By Laura Kohlhagen, MD, MBA, Chief Medical Officer for Sunrise™, Altera Digital Health
You wouldn’t ask a chef to bake a cake without the right ingredients, and you wouldn’t have a contractor build your house without the right tools. Yet in healthcare, we expect providers to deliver the best care possible without the right data at the right time.
Despite becoming a mainstay of clinical practice, many electronic health records (EHRs) have not lived up to their potential, largely due to a lack of flexibility. So, what makes an EHR truly flexible, and how can greater flexibility get healthcare organizations where they want to go?
Unpacking EHR flexibility
At a high level, flexible health IT applications combine best-practice workflows with enough adaptability to meet the unique needs of individual healthcare organizations. The ability to exchange data with other applications within the healthcare ecosystem is another key factor of EHR flexibility. Altera Digital Health adheres to these principles because we do not want to enforce rigid workflows or prevent clients from leveraging additional tools that would improve provider experiences or patient outcomes.
While flexibility is often used interchangeably with “configuration,” “customization” and “personalization,” in the context of EHRs, there are notable differences between these terms:
- Configuration involves setting up or arranging components of a system to make it operational and typically focuses on adjusting parameters and settings to ensure proper functionality.
- Customization enables an organization to complete specific tasks within a system outside of standard industry workflows and differently than other organizations using the same system.
- Personalization is the ability for users to manage their experience at the individual level so they can access and work within the system the way they want to. These adjustments fine-tune the user experience but do not affect core EHR workflows.
Together, these three elements comprise EHR flexibility. And while positive overall, there can be too much of a good thing. If an EHR is too flexible, it can be difficult for users to learn how to use it and strain today’s smaller IT departments maintaining the system. Bearing this in mind, Altera always aims to balance flexibility with ease of use, efficiency and effectiveness as we bring new features and solutions to clients.
Removing persistent pain points
As a former practicing physician, I have seen firsthand how clunky, confusing EHRs create unnecessary stressors for providers, who would rather direct their attention away from administrative or technological burdens and toward patients. A flexible EHR that mirrors the way providers think and perform tasks enables faster completion of workflows, offering a welcome reprieve for strained clinical teams. For example, Altera has a Sunrise™ client that is a research hospital. Because of Sunrise’s flexibility, the organization can easily add new research medications that would not be part of a typical formulary and leverage clinical decision support for those drugs. Improving provider experiences in this way also helps maximize patient throughput, which benefits an entire organization.
No matter the specialty or care setting, it is crucial for organizations to address technology-induced burnout, especially amid persistent clinician shortages. One survey of physicians and advanced practice providers found that those who are very satisfied with their EHRs are nearly five times more likely to report plans to stay at their organizations than those who are very dissatisfied. Given that replacing one physician can cost an organization $500k–$1M, the financial risk of an inflexible EHR cannot be overstated.
From an IT standpoint, flexible EHRs can also enhance the efforts of IT staff members, who are increasingly being asked to do the same (or more) with fewer resources. Flexibility enables IT teams to implement a system in a way that matches their strongest knowledge bases (e.g., running an application through on-premises servers or through hosting). Additionally, because all types of users are less likely to be frustrated by a flexible EHR, the IT team can reduce the time spent addressing support tickets and focus more on initiatives that propel the organization forward.
Driving new opportunities
Prioritizing flexibility is not just a way to reduce challenges within a healthcare organization, but also key to paving the way for new possibilities. From the cloud to containerized services, technologies advancing EHR flexibility are enabling faster, smoother upgrades and integrations with exciting new applications that leverage artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), ambient voice capabilities and the like.
As the industry continues to evolve, Altera remains focused on our mission to bring healthcare to a higher level—for everyone involved. Flexibility is bringing that within reach.
Looking for an alternative, flexible and secure EHR solution? Learn more about Sunrise from Altera Digital Health here.