As a large revenue generator for healthcare organizations, the perioperative areas must rely on timely data to inform planning, patient throughput, cost management, and decision-making. However, too often these departments underutilize the full capabilities of the EHR.
This was a common discussion topic at last month's 2018 OR Manager Conference and Exhibition in Nashville. Nordic’s Vice President of Optimization and Advisory Services Brian Beinborn and Manager of Optimization Solutions Munaf Noorani recently returned from this conference, where they met with perioperative leaders to discuss top challenges and priorities around EHR optimization. Below, Brian and Munaf break down four main EHR optimization priorities for the perioperative areas.
Stemming the opioid crisis
The opioid crisis is a top concern for perioperative leaders since it’s a factor in the OR – both in procedural preparations and in post-surgical pain management. Much of the discussion on this topic centered around how new standards from The Joint Commission call for providers to use alternative methods and a more conservative approach to manage pain.
When it comes to the EHR, providers can use this data to compare and identify outliers for post-surgical pain management orders. New protocols can also be defined and configured in the EHR through updated order sets or preference lists. Users will need training to implement these new tools, but if best practices are applied, organizations could potentially identify opioid misuse and intervene much sooner. Going forward, it will be important for providers to monitor and compare the impact of these changes over time.
Improving preference card maintenance
The relationship between preference cards and materials management is critical to the OR. Room setup, turnover times, documentation efficiency, costs, charges, and patient safety all depend on the accuracy of these two elements.
Small changes to preference card maintenance can lead to a large reduction in supply waste and costs. We met with OR leaders at the Nordic booth and shared best practices for leveraging incoming and depletion interfaces with ERP systems to improve inventory management and reduce the time it takes staff to manually count supplies. Room turnover time can decrease with more accurate preference cards, which can also improve charge capture – a pain point for many organizations. To help alleviate this issue, perioperative leaders are focused on improved integration between their EHR and ERP systems in 2019.
Making data-driven decisions
Data, as it is in all areas of healthcare, is a top focus area for perioperative leaders. At the conference, OR managers emphasized the use of reports to make data-driven decisions. While they acknowledged that it can be easy for outside factors to get in the way of making data-driven decisions, organizations that use data visualization tools have an easier time with this process. By leveraging and evolving these tools over time, OR managers have had success running their perioperative departments at peak efficiency.
Watch this video to learn how we help our client partners drive valuable results from their data.
Optimizing pre-admission testing workflows
Pre-admission testing (PAT) workflows are another priority for perioperative leaders. Ensuring patients have current and updated H&Ps, consents, orders, and results prior to the day of surgery is critical to patient safety, clinical staff’s efficiency, and the OR’s bottom line. Historically, sites struggle to identify and gather this information efficiently prior to surgery. For example, the items could have been performed at the patient’s primary care office, which may not be on the same EHR. Or, the information may not exist in an EHR at all – it could be on paper or scanned. These factors can cause delayed or cancelled surgeries and patient safety concerns.
Since OR time is valuable, one presenter discussed tools and processes she is applying to improve PAT workflows. For organizations live on Epic, implementing Procedure Pass can lead to reduced day-of-surgery cancellations and improved on-time starts, staff efficiency, and patient satisfaction.
We are pleased to help our client partners address these and other EHR optimization priorities in the perioperative suite. If you have questions about our solutions or would like to chat about improvements to your perioperative areas, please reach out.
