ARRA stimulus funding has been aimed at Electronic Health Records (EHR), but now, Laserfiche users in the healthcare industry can be encouraged by recent broader certification options for federal stimulus eligibility for their current and future IT investment.

“The rate of EHR adoption must now be tripled to meet the ambitious ARRA time lines,” explains Mark Leavitt, chairman of Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology (CCHIT), the only federally recognized EHR certification organization. “We need to serve a more diverse spectrum of providers and offer a wider range of EHR technology options from which to choose,” he explains. “So, we’re widening our previous single-lane road to [certification to] the equivalent of a three-lane freeway.”

Key is the provision that healthcare providers now make “meaningful use” of a certified EHR system to qualify for funding – and that’s prompted CCHIT to add two new certification paths for practices wishing to certify the EHR systems they’ve built themselves.

“There’s nothing definite yet, but this is potentially great news for Laserfiche users,” says Andy Kuo, healthcare marketing specialist for Laserfiche. “Previous paths were only focused on certifying all-encompassing EHRs. Now, it looks like document management systems are going to play a role in stimulus funding too.”

Specifically, the commission’s proposed “EHR-S” certification path provides a greatly simplified, low cost site-level certification program that will enable providers who self-develop or assemble EHRs from noncertified sources to also qualify for the stimulus funding.

Todd Blum, CEO for Ear, Nose, and Throat Associates of South Florida, is one of the Laserfiche users in a position to pursue the EHR-S certification path. Blum expanded the back office applications for his Laserfiche system to the front office, where it’s being used for patient health charts. After each patient visit, staffers scan the doctor’s handwritten notes into Laserfiche, leaving the doctors more time to see more patients.

A common complaint about EHR systems is that doctors have to type their patient’s notes into the system either during or after the visit, spending more time on their computer than with patients.

“Every patient of ours has a chart in Laserfiche; it works and acts like an EHR for us,” Blum explains. “We’ve gone paperless without physicians being forced to be expensive scribes. Fifteen minutes of training and they’re up and running.”

Another argument is the incredibly large failure rate for traditional EHR packages. “There is a 78 percent failure rate out there for all these full-blown EMR systems. That’s because many practices are going from basic level 1 practice management software packages to level 10 EMR packages,” says Mark R. Anderson, CEO of the AC Group, a healthcare technology advisory and research firm in Montgomery, TX. Instead, Anderson recommends an “incremental approach” using more generalized document management systems to provide a practice with a more gradual introduction to the technology, while still enabling staff to reap the benefits of increased efficiency.

Those are all powerful arguments for providing stimulus funding for Laserfiche users, Kuo says. But there’s work to be done before those systems are likely to meet even the broadened CCHIT standards. Government interest in increasing electronic access to, and communications between, healthcare providers has boiled down to EHR systems satisfying two broad-reaching technological concepts: datamining and interoperability.

Datamining refers to turning a practice’s patient health charts into a database that can be mined for statistics to aid research. Interoperability refers to the ability of those individual databases to network and exchange information as well as provide around-the-clock remote access to a patient’s health records. Together, they will anchor a national patient healthcare database to aid medical research and dramatically reduce medical errors while improving diagnostics.

EHR systems usually use computerized forms to build these kinds of patient information databases, but this is essentially working from the top-down, neglecting the role of document imaging and management in EHR technology. “Now, [EHR developers] are trying to play catch-up and it’s resulting in some systems that, quite frankly, don’t work very well,” Kuo says.

The big problem with existing EHR systems is different healthcare practices can have dramatically different information applications and needs. The one-and-done record keeping of surgery centers involves considerably less paperwork than an endocrinologist’s office or cardiologist’s, as Laserfiche users the SurgiCenter of Baltimore discovered. “As a surgery center, we typically only see a patient two or three times, so we didn’t need the functionality of a traditional EMR—not to mention the expense,” says Jeffery Johnson, systems information specialist. “We knew we needed to move to electronic record keeping, however, so Laserfiche seemed to be an ideal solution. We could eliminate paper, secure our records and easily locate information, which was just what we needed.”

Not to mention that one-size-fits all EHR systems often need extensive customization to meet individual needs. “We had everything we needed to go live with our EHR but we had problems getting it customized to our office,” says Michelle Rusk, office administrator at the Plano Childrens Medical Clinic in Plano, TX, now a Laserfiche user. “Some of the software applications applied well to our practice, some didn’t. Now, we have all the equipment that we bought for the system but it’s not being used.”

One solution both Kuo and industry experts agree on is building the health record databases from archival and incoming health charts and then moving into datamining and interoperability.

Users can be encouraged by the fact that Laserfiche can do a lot to fulfill datamining and interoperability. The automatic population of electronically indexed template fields through Quick Fields, for example, is the first step to datamining, Kuo says. “With your index fields you can locate patients in a database by age, address, illness, blood-pressure or cholesterol count—anything that you specify in your template fields,” Kuo continues. “Then Audit Trail helps you keep track of who accesses that information and when.”

Kuo will present a webinar, “Don’t Change The Way You Work – Change The Waste You Work,” Thursday, August 20th at 2 pm PST and is available to answer questions regarding Laserfiche and EHR ARRA funding. Contact him at Andy.Kuo@laserfiche.com.

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Posted on Wednesday, August 12th, 2009 at 1:58 pm under UserNews. You can comment on this post.