Improving The Doctor/Patient Relationship

At Health IT Outcomes, we’ve made it our mission to provide the healthcare industry with expert guidance on technology system selection, integration, project management, and change management. To help achieve this goal, we speak with industry leaders on everything from EHRs to HIEs to HIM, and then share these conversations with you. We recently traveled to Chicago to attend HIMSS15 where we had the privilege to speak with Rich Berner, president of Allscripts International and Sunrise. He discussed improving outcomes, engaging patients, and where he sees Meaningful Use headed in the coming year.

Health IT Voices: Can you provide us with a brief overview of yourself and what Allscripts does?

Berner: Allscripts focuses on helping people live longer, healthier, happier lives, and we do this by providing solutions and innovative technology that helps providers increase patient safety quality and streamline operations. I work with providers and governments around the world to help them cost effectively improve the lives of the populations they manage.

We pride ourselves on driving outcomes and client successes — we like to say we shine through reflected light. We’re especially proud of our new clients in particular, like St Clare’s Hospital in Lebanon, Pennsylvania. They have reduced ED wait times from 49 minutes to four minutes, that’s not only good for the institution, but also good for all of us who are patients.

Then we have Springhill Medical Centre which has achieved HIMMS stage 7 in the end round adoption model which is very difficult to achieve. From a solutions standpoint, we’re very focused on making the electronic medical record easier for clinicians to use.

Health IT Voices: Most clinicians aren’t fans for a lot of EMRs for different reasons — it increases demands, interrupts workflows, and reduces time with patients. How is Allscripts addressing these issues?

Berner: We’ve really got to focus more on the outcomes. Implementing an EMR is a lot of change. Essentially, we’re putting clinicians, who are very smart, dedicated people, through more change than people in most industries have gone through. We need to focus on why they’re doing this and the outcomes that we’re going to help them drive. There are some things clinicians are going to have to do that they didn’t have to do before, but ultimately this is going to be better for the whole care team and provide safer care.

Some of the solutions we’re focusing on aim to reduce the number of clicks and take advantage of all the technology out there. We have to give them better decision support, better evidence, and tools that help them provide better care.

Health IT Voices: Tell us a little about some of the specific ways in which solutions your company offers actually make the patient-doctor interface go more smoothly.

Berner: We launched a program this year called the client outcomes collaboration program in which we take and outcome a client has achieved — one with evidence to back it up — and we package it up and roll it out to another client to prove it can be repeated. They can learn from their peers, see our monthly webinar, and guide themselves to achieve those same outcomes.

For example, in January we worked with Bronx Lebanon, which achieved a reduction in length of stay through better managing of their nutrition workflows. In February, we worked with the National Institute of Health where they achieved better efficacy with pharmaco-genetics with the administration of Plavix as well as a reduction in hypersensitivity of allergic reactions.

So again, it’s back to focus on the outcomes. Show them the outcomes they can achieve through the use of this technology that they couldn’t achieve on their own and people get excited about using it.

I work with providers and governments from around the world and every country I go into, everybody is facing the same challenges. They have this aging population and they’re showing up with multiple core morbidities; it’s putting pressure on the system that’s already stretched out.

You have to be able to aggregate data from across the community and run analytics to better understand your patients. Then, you need to come up with a plan of care that sits with a patient no matter where they are: the home, doctor’s office, or hospital.

Lastly, you could have the best evidence, the best clinicians, and the best protocols, but we have to able to engage patients and change their behavior. At Allscripts, we provide a population health management suite that does all of those things.

Health IT Voices: What’s your stance on Meaningful Use?

Berner: What I love about Meaningful Use is the focus on meaningfully using the technology to optimize and improve care. With Stage 3, now that a lot of the infrastructure is in place, we continue to focus with clients on the outcomes we’re trying to drive instead of doing this because of the government certification. I think it has accelerated adoption that would normally take many more years. Now that we have the infrastructure in place as an outcome of meaningful use, the really exciting stuff starts in terms of how we can improve healthcare.