The Long and Winding Road: Being Ready for the Challenge

1
The Long and Winding Road Being Ready for the
Challenge

• Shasta Community Health Centers Experience with
  Electronic Health Records

2
EHR The Overall Objective

• To improve the quality of care provided to our
  patients the doctor-patient relationship.
• To improve the overall health of the populations
  we serve the CHC imperative.
• Improve the health of your Community i.e.
  Reaching the SUN!!

3
The Corporate Culture

• A prerequisite To develop a corporate culture
  that embraces technology as an essential tool
• Work from the simple then to the complex e.g.
  all employees have an email account and access to
  computers.
• Look for work processes that can be improved with
  simple technology applications.

4
Pay attention to the processes you use in
delivering care

• Understand your processes (e.g. how you make
  appointments move patients through their visit
  contact them with lab results, etc.)
• Once you understand your processes it gives you
  the opportunity to critically evaluate EHR
  systems and to take advantage of the power of
  these systems so that you can redesign your own
  processes to improve access, quality of care and
  many other systems.

5
External Pressure No one wants to be the last,
but be ready!

• Expectations and optimism abound, sometime with
  grant money attached, but in my opinion, the
  truth is that there are few examples of
  successful and fully applied EHR clinical
  environments, certainly even less among CHCs.
• So, there are no short-cuts and may different
  ways to get there we started our process in 1998
  and SCHC still has a way to go yet.
• Expect efficiency/performance degradation when
  you finally and first get started with EHR
  understand the need for initial/ongoing training
  of all staff, good IT support, clinical buy-in
  and sufficient cash-flow/reserves to withstand
  billing problems in the early going.

6
EHR is the future of improved Quality of Care

• EHR offers powerful point of care access to
  almost any piece of information providing the
  opportunity to make the best clinical decisions.
• EHR offers management, clinicians, boards and the
  public the opportunity to measure quality through
  indicators that have much greater accuracy.
• EHR is a hard road but one that if done
  correctly, offers a powerful opportunity to
  improve the health of the patients we serve.