Healthcare IT Update

STRATEGIES: Bridge the IT-Clinician Gap with 3 Field-Tested Tactics

Don’t forget this crucial step AFTER implementation. You can spend stimulus cash on a shiny new information technology system but it’ll be money down the drain if you don’t bring your staff on board. Glide over implementation speed bumps by engaging staff in the process and head off resistance to change. Avoid this: Across all sectors, 40 percent of IT projects fail or are abandoned, related Linda Reed, RN, MBA, VP/CIO of Atlantic Health in Morris Plains, N.J., at the April Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference in Chicago. Often, failure stems from an inadequate project management process or improper alignment with the organization’s culture. Beat the statistics with these threestrategies for bringing IT, vendors, and staff closer together. 1. Gauge Staff’s Readiness Assessing staff’s readiness to transition to a new technology is really a “code word” for gauging resistance, said Reed.

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Do Your Clinicians Resist HIT? Solve The Germy Device Problem for Them

How you can solve a big concern that might be making your doctors and nurses shun HIT. To health information geeks, technology is boundlessly capable of improving health care. Take infection control, for example. EHR can potentially make sense of seemingly disconnected data to help health care professionals spot outbreaks sooner. But while you’re envisioning the future of infection control, your clinicians are thinking about the here and now, writes skilled nursing facility expert Karen Lusky, BA, MSN, RN. When you think about it, those EMR devices you might be asking clinicians to carry from room to room are pretty gross. Good news: You and your health care organization’s clinicians can work together to take simple steps that prevent bacterial contamination from common HIT equipment.

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EHR: Show Your Physicians What’s In It For Them

Drop the paper chart, Tiger. If the clinicians at your hospital or health system are carping about your EHR system’s learning curve, here’s one way to win their buy-in. Show them how your EHR can reduce denials for their reimbursement on the Part B side. An EHR can eradicate a common reason physicians get denials for Part B services in Part A settings — a missing chief complaint, explains Jules Enatsky, RT, BSN, CPC-H, a senior consultant with JA Thomas & Associates. When several different specialists are seeing a hospital patient, for example, they begin their notes by commenting how the patient is responding to a treatment or medication, without documenting why the patient is being treated, Enatsky writes in The Coding Edge. “If an admitting physician and one or two consulting providers all bill subsequent inpatient care…

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