What then is EHR?

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An hour and twenty minutes on the train to Washington. The young woman behind me:

“And she was like…”

“And I was like…”

“And they were like…”

“And she was like…”

Ninety long minutes.  She never got off the train, and in a way I feel responsible. I locked her in the bathroom…She kept right on talking…”And she was like…”

The lanky guy seated across the aisle from me was a human tattoo museum.  The matron by the window spent an hour trying to decide which ringtone to use for incoming calls, listening repeatedly to the dozens of options with the phone’s volume set to its highest level.

So went my day.  Arriving home late at night I did the unthinkable, the unforgivable—wiped my hands on the decorative towels in the guest bathroom.  You probably have the same towels.  In fact, you probably have not even cut of the tags.  There they hang.  They have hung in the same spot, undisturbed.  Generations have come and gone, yet the towels stay.  They have become a fixture.

There are three categories of stuff—wants, needs, and must-haves.  I want a Porsche, I need air, and I must have towels that nobody will ever use.

What then is EHR?  For many hospitals it has become a must-have.  I have always thought nine figures was a lot of money to spend on something that saw no more use than guest-towels.

Patient Experience Management is abi-normal

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I remember the first time I entered their home I was taken aback by the clutter.  Wet leaves and small branches were strewn across the floors and furniture. Black, Hefty trash bags stood against the walls filled with last year’s leaves. Dozens of bright orange buckets from Home Depot sat beneath the windows. The house always felt cold, very cold. After a while I learned to act normally around the clutter.

There came a time however when I simply had to ask, “Why all the buckets? What’s the deal with the leaves?”

“We try hard to keep the place neat,” she replied.

“Where does it all come from?” I asked.

“The open windows, the stuff blows right in.”

I looked at her somewhat askance. “I’m not sure I follow,” I replied as I began to feel uneasy.

“It’s not like we like living this way; the water, the cold, the mess. It costs a fortune to heat this place.  And, the constant bother of emptying the buckets, and the sweeping of the leaves.”

Trying to assume the role of thought leader I asked, “Why don’t you shut your windows? It seems like that would solve a lot of your problems.”

She looked at me like I had just tossed her cat in a blender.

When you see something abnormal often enough it becomes normal. Sort of like in the movie The Stepford Wives.  Sort of like Patient Experience Management (PEM). The normal has been subsumed by the abnormal, and in doing so is slowing devouring the resources of the hospital.

Are you kidding me? I wish. It’s much easier to see this as a consultant than it is if you are drinking the Kool Aid daily. When I talk to people about a statistic that indicates that 500 people called yesterday about their bill, and everyone looks calm and collected, it makes me feel like I must be the only one in the room who doesn’t get it—again with The Stepford Wives.

If I ask about the high call volume they always have an answer, the same answer.  “Billing calls are usually around 500 a day.”  They say that with a straight face as though they are waiting to see if I will drink the Kool Aid. It’s gotten to the point where no matter how bad things get, as long as they are consistently bad, there not bad at all.

This is the mindset that enables the PEM manager (I know you don’t have one—I am being facetious) to be fooled by his or her own metrics. When is someone going to understand that repeatedly having thousands of people calling to tell your organization you have a problem, means you have a problem?

It would probably take less than a week to pop something on your web site, and post a YouTube video explaining how to read the bill.  Next week, do the same thing and help patients understand how to file claims and disputes—granted, you may need more than a week for this one.

EHR’s: COWs, WOWs, and Flashlights

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Timing is everything. In the case of EHR, timing, Apple’s timing for bringing the iPad to market, was three to five years too late. 

That is why hospitals spent millions on hard-wiring computers into patients’ rooms and nurses’ stations.  Would’a, could’a, should’a gone wireless.  But no one knew.  Hospitals were not prescient enough to have gone wireless in the middle of the prior decade as everyone still thought wireless technology was a canard.  Nobody even knew what an app was, let alone that an app for a user interface to the EHR could be run off of a tablet.

That is why most EHR desktops are hardwired to a wall.  And which wall is it?  It is usually the wall across from the foot of the patient’s bed, the one furthest from the patient, the wall that requires the healthcare professional (HCP) to turn away from the patient to be able to enter data.

Suppose for a moment your organization decided to learn just how effective was the investment in the hundred-million dollar EHR.  One way to do this is to audit some number of health records to investigate whether or not the data for the patient record is and complete valid.  That approach will provide you with a modicum of what you need to know.  That answers the question, is the EHR being used?

Valid data does not answer the following questions:

·       Who input the data

·       Was it input in real-time while the HCP was with the patient or was it input at the end of rounds?

·       Did the HCP use paper and pen to record data

·       Was non real-time input done from the information on the HCP’s paper? In other words was the data captured twice?

·       If the data was captured twice, are both instances of the data correct?  Which patient record is the record of record; the paper or the EMR?

·       Have each of the various stakeholders—nurses, therapists, physicians—developed their own way of using/not using the EHR?

·       Do they each have their own workarounds?

Here are some recent actual observations about the use of the EHR at a large hospital:

·       Most of the patient data is entered at the end of the HCP’s rounds.

·       Data is entered on a large number of manual forms

·       The data on the forms does not match the data required on the EHR screens

·       The forms do not match the screens

·       Data is pushed from the forms to the EHR

·       Hospital exams are recorded on paper

·       Charting while on rounds meant the HCP was only able to cover 2/3 of their patient load

·       HCPs had to login to the computer and to the EHR dozens of times to complete their rounds

Here is my favorite observation gleaned from shadowing the HCPs—the EHR is used as a flashlight.  HCPs stand next to the EHR screen and use the light emitted from the screen to help them see to write their notes on paper.

The items referenced above illustrate ineffectiveness and inefficiency.  Duplication of data, duplication of work. These will lead to errors and a loss in productivity.  The good news though is that the hospital now has several hundred large flashlights.

Also observed were COWs and WOWs with EHRs—Carts On Wheels and Workstations On Wheels.  It just goes to show you that you can learn something new every day.

Healthcare IT: Shave the Cat

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As I was going up the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there.

He wasn’t there again today…I think, I think, he’d gone away.

This particular fellow happened to be a CIO.  Now, before you throw tomatoes at your monitor, he was atypical; I hope.

We were talking about the various healthcare initiatives that have his attention as the CIO of a hospital.

EHR—done

Meaningful Use—we will pass it in April

Planning for HIPAA 5010 and ICD-10—starting in July

He did not even blink.  It was almost like he was bemused by the triviality of what he faced.  Listening to him, it sounded like he was reading from a scrap of paper he had pulled from hi pants pocket:

  1. Pick up one gallon of milk
  2. Finish EHR
  3. Drop off dry cleaning
  4. Collect ARRA money
  5. Shave the cat
  6. Convert ten thousand systems to 5010
  7. Walk on water

If there is a difference between being confident and being grounded in reality, he may be the poster child.

We are hiring

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business systems design…write me…designers, researchers, business development, PMO… lnkd.in/rf_3Fu

ICD-10’s Hidden Cost

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The characters on the train into Philadelphia, while never dull, were more interesting than usual this morning.  The woman across the aisle from me wore her hair in a style that could be described best as resembling a termite mound.  The ride felt so much like bumper cars that I was tempted to ask the driver if he had to pass some sort of training program to get his license, or if all he had to do was to collect a certain number of bottle caps.  It gives me the feeling that there should be a lifeguard at the gene pool.

The med student seated next to me on the train reads his book, but then, everyone one the train reads. I asked him what he was reading.  Turns out it was a book about converting from ICD-9 to ICD-10.  Medical coding.  Those little numbers, charge codes, on your doctor’s invoice that enable the doctor to charge you for the specific services provided.  There didn’t seem to be much of a plot, and he did not seem to be very engrossed in the material.

The conversion from ICD-9 to ICD-10 may be the biggest gotcha on healthcare’s horizon, especially with regard to hospitals.

Money will be spent and money will be lost—lots of it.

Health and Human Services (HHS) estimates that the cost of converting can be broken down into three categories, and it estimate the relative cost of those categories:

  • Training                              22%
  • Lost productivity               35%
  • System changes                43%

Two of these, training and system changes, are controlled variables.  They relate to things the service provider will be doing.  The other, lost productivity is the result of how well the service provider managed the other two.

HHS estimates productivity charges will range from 6-10% due to the fact that it will take people between 500 and 1,000 hours to become proficient in the new codes.  Others have estimated that for hospitals with more than 500 beds the total cost of the conversion (actual cost plus opportunity cost) will be more than ten million dollars.

So, in layman’s terms, what does that mean with regard to the business of managing the hospital?  How does one develop a project plan for lost productivity?  What are the tasks?

Let’s look at what is involved.

System Changes:

Everything will be changing; business rules, business processes, forms, reports, and systems.  Ask yourself which systems that you use involve coding?  Now ask yourself if you like using those systems.  Are they easy to use?  Are they easily understood?  If the only thing changed in those systems is the codes, they will still be just as tedious to use and those systems will be less usable.

A large hospital will spend five million or more dollars to change systems and the end result will be that those systems, at least for the first 500 to 1,000 hours will be less usable.  I believe those hours are underestimated.  Most systems are tied to other systems into what has become a bit of a kluge.  Changing integrated systems is a lot like playing the children’s game Pick Up Sticks—touching one stick often winds up making things happen to the other sticks.  Changing one system will cause things to happen to the other systems.  Ineffectiveness breeds more ineffectiveness.

Lost Productivity:

According to estimates, thirty-five cents out of every dollar spent on the conversion will be allocated to lost productivity.  This is like buying a gallon of milk and having to pour a third of it in the sink before you placed the carton in the refrigerator.

What are the why’s and where’s of the productivity loss, and what can be done about it?  Interpreting the HHS estimates, they are essentially stating that while the conversion will be done, it will not be done well.  In fact, those in the know published that hundreds of millions of dollars will be lost converting to ICD-10.

Will your hospital be contributing to that loss?  Without question; unless you figure out the causal factors of that loss, and put a plan in place to prevent it.  HHS calculates hospitals will lose thirty-five cents on the dollar even after having spent twenty-two cents of every dollar to train people.

Plan on fifty-seven cents of every dollar spent on the conversion to ICD-10 being wasted.  Get that milk carton out of the refrigerator and pour some more into the sink.

Training:

The training program envisioned by HHS that hospitals will undertake will result in a planned productivity loss of thirty-five percent.  What will your productivity loss be if your training program is less effective than whatever HHS was envisioning?  Clearly they are not holding out high hope for the success of ICD-10 training given that it is estimated that becoming proficient in the new coding could take one thousand hours.  (It only takes about 50 hours of training to obtain a private pilot’s license.)

Training, the variable over which a hospital has the most control is the area where the hospital has the least experience.  After all, the hospital has never had a business system designer design an ICD-10 training program.

Training will be about learning to use correctly new screens and forms and new business processes and business rules.  It must include those in finance and IT, coders, and healthcare professionals.  To be effective, it should be role-based; customized.

Left up to the usual way of doing it, hospitals will provide classroom study, 24-40 hours. They will probably develop a train-the-trainers program, and the trainees will be presented with a nice-looking ICD-10 training certificate.  Good luck.

Training may be needed for more than half of a hospital’s employees.  For training to be effective and to minimize the loss of productivity it must be designed.  It must include:

  • What will the altered systems user interface (UI) look like
  • Should people be trained on that UI, or will changing the UI result in much less training
  • What will the altered forms look like
  • Should people be trained on those forms, or could designing new forms result in much less training
  • Can the training be designed to be delivered online
  • Can the training be designed to be delivered on portable devices
  • Can the training be designed by roles
  • Can the training be designed by person to assess what areas need more training

The answers to these questions are Yes.  Whether it will be is up to you.  Designing a training program will significantly decrease the cost of training and significantly decrease the productivity loss.

How to push the EHR into the cloud

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For those wondering if the fact that I have not written recently is a result of me having mellowed or having found the world more to my liking, not true.  I have been busy earning minus points as I tried to get it sorted in those wide open spaces of my mind.  It is difficult for me to find much comfort in sleep when I think all the leftist gremlins are in cahoots—I see two masons shaking hands and I think conspiracy.

Now, before this begins to read like I wandered too far from the republican rest home, I note that some of my best friends actually know democrats; so I am not as close-minded, or perhaps clothes-minded, as I would like to be.

Some are slow to adapt ideas to a changing world, aimlessly swatting new ideas away with a no-pest-strip as though they were plague carrying mosquitos.  Their thoughts, frozen in time, move so slowly they have been overtaken by a skateboard—and that skateboard was under someone’s arm.  These are the same individuals whose ability to play outside of the comfort of their own sandbox has not been seen since the internet was powered by steam.  It is a little like being a dinosaur while those around you are still floundering in the primordial bisque, still trying to wrap their synapses around the cold ideas distilled in the anecdote.

That is not to suggest that others do not think.  I am sure they have dozens of thoughts scribbled on the inside of their head, but those thoughts are erased each time they play with their hair—brains not big enough to swing a cat in without giving it a minor concussion.  There are fomenting alchemies of thought nuggets, but never quite enough to turn base metals into gold.  Sometimes, when the lighting is just right, you can see their curve of illogic thought arching overhead like static electricity.

In normal prose, I tend to be few of words.  I can get through entire days uttering no more than ‘uh-huh,’ a condition to which I attribute having exited the womb not fully-formed.  Writing is different than the spoken word.  For one thing writing is infinitely easier and more pleasingly voyeuristic, for it can be more entertaining to write about venomous ideas, not enough to kill my prey, simply to stun it.

Where then do ideas originate?  They are not like sex in a packet where all you have to do is add water.  The lack of thinking has led us to a tragic age most refuse to take tragically.  Thought patterns are aborted before they germinate, as though the thinker was taking intellectual contraceptives.  But believe it or not, I often find myself hoisted high on the petard of my own self-induced mesanic naivetés.  When a spark of a thought enters my mind, I rarely let it go quietly into that good night.  Instead I tear at it like Henry VIII coming off a forced diet—I know I mixed the metaphor, but I liked it.

I know rarely how my mind moves me from thoughts A to B.  Today proved no different.  Take the Poken.  This device is the newest technological mind-nibblet—a tiny jump-drive device about the size of prune whose purpose in life is to help two individuals sync their personal contacts by pok-in’ their respective Pokens.

You have got to hand it to them, for it sounds like it could be more entertaining than syncing one’s Blackberry.  If I understand correctly the concept, if my Poken pokes your Poken the Pokii mate—Pokii may or may not be the correct form of the plural, but it will have to do for now.  Once the mating process has ended, and before mine finishes its cigarette, I have your contact information and you have mine.

This could be an interesting way to swap business contacts, but as I live in the land of the Jabberwocky my mind does not work that way.  “Then he got an idea, an awful idea. The Grinch got a wonderful, awful idea.”

I jested about the Poken a few days ago, and then I thought about how this device could be made to work in healthcare.  The Poken is a communication device, sending and receiving secure requests to the cloud to permit one to access and update contact information.  Not much of a healthcare offering doing that, but what if?  What if instead of letting me share my contact information with someone I select, it, or something like it, allowed me to share my personal health record with my physician?  What if my physician was able to update my health record using a similar device?

The EMR and PMR applications would be in the cloud.  The Poken would provide the “handshake.”  One fully functional EMR.  The rest is history.  Thanks for playing along.

What EHR users really want

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I just read an article in the Harvard Business Review about the notion of what Henry Ford would have said if he were asked what people wanted.  The oft-quoted response was “Faster horses.”

At one point Ford had two-thirds of the market.  A few years later Ford’s share had dropped to fifteen percent.  Those in the know suggest this drop accrued to the fact that the customers did not want faster horses; they wanted better cars.

This is somewhat in line with how the healthcare providers have responded to EHR systems.  The hospitals with whom I have spoken have made a wide range of choices with regard to what they are doing with their EHR.

  • They use it because they have no other choice
  • They continue to do paper charting and use the EHR after the fact
  • They use it as a document management system and continue to dictate
  • They use the monitor as a flashlight to help them see while they write their notes
  • They sign a petition stating they are not going to use the EHR that is being forced upon them
  • They change EHRs believing that anything else has to be better than the system they are using

These are all variations of the faster horse theory of EHR.

What EHR’s users want is a better EHR, one that helps them do their job rather than one that hinders them.

Is Your EHR More Like iPhone Or iTunes?

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Below is my latest post on healthsystemcio.com.  Let me know what you think.

Times are perilous, and they ain’t a-changin.  As Europe focuses its attention on whether the Euro will become a collector’s item, and the Middle East eagerly awaits the chance to lower the amount it pays for air conditioning because of the surplus of electricity that will be available from all of Iran’s nuclear reactors, America is all a-twitter about what Angelina Jolie was wearing at the Oscars.

No wonder the impact of the billions being spent on healthcare IT has taken a back seat.

Ask yourself, how good is your EHR? Does it do what you want it to do? Does it do it in the way you need it to do it? If it was your decision, would you have spent a hundred or two-hundred million dollars for it?

Okay, get the smirk off your face.

I have been writing recently a lot about the difference between user acceptance (UA) and the usability of large business systems like EHR systems. A business system is a lot more than an IT application. It also includes process and people — users.

Achieving high user acceptance is easy. Implement one system and make everyone use it. Check the box. User acceptance only involves the IT application: the EHR. UA does not measure the value of the business system to the users; it simply measures the percentage of users.

Usability is a testament to whether or not the system, in this case the EHR, adds value to the organization, to its users. Does it make them better, more effective, more efficient? The secret sauce towards achieving good usability is the addition of design.

Here is an example of a company with two business systems depicting the difference between UA and usability. The company is Apple, the two business systems are the iPhone and iTunes.

iPhone system:

  • Phone, camera, game player, GPS, email, SMS, MP3 player
  • One button
  • No training required
  • Great usability

iTunes system:

  • Web shopping program for purchasing services to use on Apple products
  • Full keyboard
  • High learning curve
  • Poor usability, poor user experience
  • High UA — users have no other choice

Brothers from different mothers. Their usability is so different that it is difficult to believe both business systems came from the same company.

  • One business system lets you do everything using one button; the other barely lets you do anything using 61 keys.
  • One is intuitive, one is anything but

I am willing to bet your EHR reminds your users more of iTunes than it does the iPhone. You can choose to accept it as is, or you can make it better. The great thing about business systems, unlike products, is you can choose to apply design to a poor business system and gain tremendous value for little investment. Or not.

Healthcare IT’s Black Hole

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Last year scientists turned on the largest machine ever made, the Hadron Collider. It’s a proton accelerator. This all takes place in a donut-shaped underground tube that is 17 miles in circumference.

Fears about the collider centered on two things; black holes and the danger posed by weird hypothetical particles, strangelets, that critics said could transform the Earth almost instantly into a dead, dense lump. Physicists calculated that the chances of this catastrophe were negligible, based on astronomical evidence and assumptions about the physics of the strangelets. One report put the odds of a strangelet disaster at less than one in 50 million, less than a chance of winning some lottery jackpots—what they failed to acknowledge is that someone always wins the lottery, so negligible risk exists only in the mind of the beholder.

If I understand the physics correctly from my Physics for Librarians mail-order course—and that’s always a big if—once these protons accelerate to something close to the speed of light, when they collide, the force of the collision causes the resultant mass to have a density so massive that it creates a gravitational field from which nothing can escape. The two protons become a mini black hole. And so forth and so on. Pascal’s triangle on steroids. Two to the nth power (2ⁿ) forever. Every proton, neutron, electron, car, house, and so on.

The collider could do exactly what it was designed to do. Self fulfilling self destruction. Technology run amuck. Let’s personalize it. Instead of a collider, let’s build a national healthcare information network (N-HIN) capable of handling more than 1,000,000 transports a day. What are the rules of engagement?  Turn on the lights and let’s see how it functions.

Let’s say we need to get anybody’s record to anybody’s doctor.  That’s overly simplistic, but if we can’t make sense out of it at this level, the N-HIN is doomed.  The number of possible permutations, although not infinite, is bigger than big.  Can you see what can happen? Strangelets.  The giant sucking sound comes from ARRA and stimulus money as it is pulled in to the black hole.

So what is the present thought leadership proposing to fight the strangelets? Healthcare information exchanges (HIEs)—mini N-HINs.  Regional Exchange Centers (RECs).  A few million, a few billion.  Not only does their plan have them repeating the same flawed approach, they are relying on embedding the same bad idea, and doing it using hundreds of different blueprints.

Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

Stop the craziness. I want to get off.

It’s the end of the world as we know it…and I feel fine. R.E.M.