According to John Windle, MD Professor and Chief of Cardiology at the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC) www.unmc.edu, “The design of EHRs are not always meeting the needs of physicians. Since there are 1.2 billion clinic visits a year in the U.S., this means that there is a staggering loss of 40 million hours of physician productivity.”
He added, “EHRs were originally designed, developed, and optimized as a financial system and a way to document payment and services rendered, but the EHR really has never been designed or developed for the people using the EHR to take care of patients.”
The UNMC received a $2.5 million grant to make EHRs more useful for health professionals and safer for patients. The five year grant was awarded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) www.ahrq.gov within HHS to measure best practices across existing EHR systems, listen to providers to learn what they believe to be the ideal system, and then build and test a model EHR system to improve patient care.
Dr. Windle principal investigator for the grant reports, “The funding came from an understanding that the intended consequences of EHR adoption also has significant unintended consequences. Preliminary research suggests that physicians resist EHR adoptions because they feel that it adversely affects their workflow, affects communications among the healthcare team, and ultimately adversely affects patient care.”
The study will specifically measure how cardiologists at diverse healthcare systems use their EHRs. This will take place at the Duke Medical Center in Durham www.dukemedicine.org, Christiana Health in Delaware www.christianacare.org, Parkview Health in Indiana www.parkview.com, and Faith Regional Health Services in Norfolk Nebraska www.frhs.org.
Dr Windle expects to be able to identify even at the end of the first year, four or five best practices and how to improve efficiency, effectiveness, and safety while using EHRs. While focusing on cardiovascular patients, the results will translate across the health professions and will be shared with vendors of EHRs.
The project is a partnership between UNMC and the University of Nebraska at Omaha www.unomaha.edu. Ann Fruhling, PhD Director of the Interdisciplinary Informatics School at UNO, as Co-Principal Investigator of the grant, will provide expertise in human computer interactions.