Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 6/6/11

Lots of things going on this week, but one that caught my eye was decidedly low tech. The United States Department of Agriculture replaced the time-worn Food Pyramid with My Plate. Fruits and vegetables cover half the plate, with a circular dairy icon that looks a bit like a bird’s eye view of a glass of milk. Desserts don’t show up; neither do fats or oils.

I do think it’s a much more simple visual than the 2005 update to the food pyramid, which took a good idea and made it incredibly confusing and hard to teach to patients. (There have been multiple iterations of the food pyramid since its debut in 1992). The Washington Post notes that the new design “fails to direct consumers away from slathering their vegetables in butter or lard.”

What, you may ask, does this have to do with health IT? Potentially a lot. Look for targeting of obesity and other conditions that can be significantly impacted by lifestyle decisions to continue to be a major factor in healthcare reform, payment initiatives, and during the 2012 Presidential campaign. For the readers at the 20,000-foot level, that may not make a big difference.

But for the IT grunts in the trenches, look for more requests for reports in this area and for dynamic alerts and clinical decision support around these conditions. As more physician groups and health systems dip their toes into the Accountable Care Organization waters, look for “cherry picking” of desirable patients and “lemon dropping” of undesirable patients to increase. American Medical News reported last week on Florida physicians who are refusing to treat patients who weigh more than 200 pounds or whose body mass index indicates obesity.

Last month I talked a little about my support of the syndromic surveillance portion of Meaningful Use. On May 25, the Centers for Disease Control released a pre-solicitation notice that states, “there is a need for practice and technical standards that support syndromic surveillance using primary and inpatient care health data.” They are looking for someone to “identify messaging standards and information exchange architectures.”

The actual solicitation (RFP) will be posted on June 26, 2011 and will be open for thirty days. I suppose the cart went a little before the horse since providers are already going to have to test this to attest to Meaningful Use in 2011 or 2012.

Most of you are already aware that CMS has proposed additional “hardship exemptions” for providers hoping to avoid the 1% Medicare pay cut in 2012. One of these is for providers who may be in the process of adopting certified EHR technology that has delayed their implementation of e-prescribing. They recognized that these delays may have been due to the fact that the list of ONC Certified HIT Products didn’t start appearing until September 2010, whereas the eRx proposal went on public display in June 2010.

It’s always nice when the Feds admit that the right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing, but it doesn’t give me confidence. Having trouble sleeping? You can read the proposal yourself here.

People who know me know I’m a shameless Netflix addict for a variety of reasons. Although I have several critically acclaimed films lined up for viewing, there is a part of me that likes mindless action flicks. This week’s pick was Unstoppable with Denzel Washington. Although most of the time I can see the plot on action films coming from a mile away, this one had some surprises and made a good diversion from the pile of technical reading I brought home with me this weekend. Have a movie recommendation, favorite ICD-9 code, or juicy CMIO rumor? E-mail me.

E-mail Dr. Jayne.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 5/31/11

Dr. Jayne Interviews KC Frank, EVP, Document Imaging Systems Corp.

KC Frank is executive vice president of Document Imaging Systems Corp. (DISC) of St. Louis, MO.

Give me some background about yourself and DISC.

DISC has been in business since 1958. Originally founded as a microfilm company, DISC has evolved into a document management solution provider focused on improving our client’s business processes. In 2007, DISC was acquired by The Flesh Company, a 98-year-old print solutions provider. I joined DISC as vice president in 2003 and have helped develop new solution offerings, strategic relationships in healthcare, and growth strategies. I am a long-time member of MGMA, AIIM, AIIM, ARMA, and TAWPI and recently received an AIIM Distinguished Service Award for accomplishments in the Information Management industry.

One of your marketing campaigns, which has been mentioned on HIStalk, is “No hybrid EMRs.” What do you mean by this?

A hybrid EMR is one where providers rely on both an electronic and paper chart post-EMR implementation. I have heard countless stories of physicians walking into encounter rooms with both a paper chart and a tablet PC. Managing patient care in a dual environment is both incredibly inefficient and frustrating. Without a solid strategy to eliminate the paper charts, the hybrid EMR will be a reality for physician groups as they migrate to EMR.

Many practices I talk to think they can scan their documents cheaper or better themselves. What’s your experience?

If organizations truly understood the process of conversion before starting, they would probably all outsource. About 50% of the clients we work with have tried to scan on their own first. Most organizations underestimate the time, difficulties and costs associated with converting their paper charts. It’s been proven many times over that a scanning process managed and executed by inexperienced staff results in double and sometimes triple the cost of outsourcing to an expert service provider.

It’s common sense. Businesses get better each time they execute a process. DISC has converted over a billion documents in our history. Physician groups may have never scanned a single chart when they start planning their implementation. Service providers like DISC are converting documents using technology designed for large batches of scanning, including scanners that cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. With better technology and processes built on experience, it’s difficult to imagine a healthcare organization that could scan cheaper and better.

How is working with outpatient medical practices different from working with a hospital, or say an academic medical center?

There are subtle differences such as project design, chart setup, document types, chart access needs, and workflows. Ultimately, with strong project management by the client and service provider, the differences are negligible.

Do you just work with local clients? What’s the farthest client or most exotic locale you’ve visited to convert charts?

We typically provide services on a regional basis. Since we are certified by both Allscripts and NextGen to provide services in the central region of the United States, the majority of our clients reside in an 18-state central region of the US. We’ve provided services as far west as California and as far east as North Carolina. Do they practice medicine in Hawaii? We’re still waiting for that call.

Thinking of some of your more difficult customers, what are some pieces of advice for practices preparing to convert from paper charts to an EHR?

First, decide on a conversion strategy. Will you outsource or attempt an in-house conversion? Will you scan all charts prior to go-live or scan by the schedule after go-live? Will you scan the entire chart or just a portion of the chart? All key strategic questions. Many times organizations lean on providers like DISC to help understand the pros and cons of each of the strategies.

Pick a strong project manager. Many times the HIM or medical records director is the right choice. Make sure the person you choose cares about the success of the project. Do not hire temp staff to manage the project.

If you choose to outsource, choose a partner that has experience with medical record conversion and the EMR you are migrating to. A service provider that doesn’t have experience with your EMR system may not be able to get the documents filed appropriately in that system.

If you plan to scan yourself, do time tests to determine how long it’ll take to scan a chart. This is critical. If an organization plans to scan by the schedule, meets with 200 patients per day, and can scan a chart in 20 minutes, it’s simple math to determine that it’ll take about 66 hours per day (8 FTEs) to keep up on that project. Don’t be caught off guard.

DISC does more than just scan old paper charts. What other solutions do practices need to manage the mountains of paper they’re used to moving? Will you go out of business when all the old charts are scanned?

If we relied solely on scanning historical charts, we would be out of business in five to seven years. Fortunately, we have developed other solutions in both document and content management to evolve with our clients. Although paper is slowly being eliminated from business processes, the volume of electronic documents and content continues to increase.

Today, we are offering solutions such as Daily Go-Forward Scanning, Revenue Cycle Document and Content Management, Accounts Payable Automation, Electronic ROI, and Business Intelligence. We also offer a variety of solutions in other vertical markets, including finance, manufacturing, education, and government. We plan on being around another 50 years.

Does it make a difference whether a scanning vendor partners with an EHR vendor?

Absolutely. Having intimate knowledge of the system the healthcare organization is implementing allows the scanning vendor to automatically load the electronic charts directly into the patient chart within the EMR. Without the auto load, healthcare organizations may be left with electronic charts stored and retrieved in a third-party system or internal network drive. This, of course, is not optimal since providers have to work within two systems to find charts instead of just the EMR.

Both Allscripts and NextGen realized the importance of this integration and put certified programs together to support their clients. DISC is a part of both of those programs.

You’re located in the Midwest, an area hit hard recently by floods and tornadoes. Any great “saves” with your clients during these disasters?

We actually did have a client this year ask us to scan hundreds of boxes of records stored in the first level of their building due to flood concerns. Unfortunately, natural disasters have a history of reducing the historical content of a business to rubble; specifically all the important documentation which resides in a paper format. Fortunately, companies like DISC can digitize that critical information so disaster recovery of those documents is as simple as reloading a backup.

Any final thoughts?

Another common strategic discussion we have with clients is whether or not they should scan the entire chart or just a portion. We have seen successful projects on both ends. Understand that the benefits many organizations expect when going to an EMR, such as eliminating chart filing labor costs and reusing paper chart storage space for revenue-generating opportunities, will not be realized until the entire chart can be removed from the chart room. This decision is typically made with one of two goals in mind – to satisfy clinical needs (partial scan) or to satisfy business needs (full scan).

E-mail Dr. Jayne.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 5/23/11

I was looking for the perfect quote to start this week’s Curbside Consult and thought I had it nailed. Like many avid readers, I tend to remember bits and pieces of great literature, but not everything. Just enough to do passably well at cocktail parties and trivia nights, but not well enough to lead a book club.

So, when I hit the Internet to validate the quote I was going to use, I was blown away by the parts I had conveniently forgotten.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way…

This is the opening of A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. I was going to use the best of times / worst of times metaphor to talk about two recent physician visits, one of which was electronic and one was paper. I’ll let you guess at which one was which because the poignancy of the rest of the quote and how applicable it is to healthcare in general strikes me too much to want to talk about anything else.

First published in 1859, the story is set in the tumultuous time of the French Revolution. The opening line serves largely to portray the contrasts inherent in that time — poverty vs. affluence, ignorance vs. enlightenment, good vs. evil, and so on. When you think about it, sometimes it seems that things haven’t changed as much in the last two hundred as we might have hoped. It feels like we’re on the cusp of a different kind of revolution, and not necessarily for the better.

Undoubtedly, this is the best of times for many people. People are living longer, largely due to improvements in health technology. Mechanical replacements for diseased body parts, amazing new drugs, implantable defibrillators — you name it.

We are, however, in a system with a great deal of inequality about how this technology is employed, resulting in a great cost to society and for many a great personal cost as well. Medical bankruptcies are again on the rise, accounting for more than sixty percent of all personal bankruptcy filings. The worst of times, indeed, when people have to choose between purchasing food and filling their prescriptions.

Meaningful Use should be the poster child for the age of wisdom and the age of foolishness. It seemed so promising: “free” federal money for providers to do what they should have been doing all along, implementing systems to improve patient care and strengthen patient safety. Many providers were already doing these things, and it seemed so easy to reward them.

The way it’s unfolding, though, is just sad. The disparity between the Medicaid and Medicare incentive programs is laughable. At times, the whole business feels like a crapshoot. If this were an investigative study, it would never have made it past the Institutional Review Board.

Many of us on the healthcare IT side of things are living in the spring of hope. We’re well on our way to having the right software installed with the right workflows and the right numerators and denominators kicking out at the end.

For some of us though, this will lead right into the winter of despair. Meaningful Use is the ultimate pass/fail class. Miss the mark by half a percent on one measure and you’re out. This doesn’t seem in keeping with the spirit of trying to improve healthcare and health outcomes.

What if we treated patients like this? “I’m sorry Mr. Jones. I know you’ve done a tremendous amount of hard work to get your diabetes under control, including exercising and losing weight. However, your hemoglobin A1c level only came down from 9.0 to 6.2. The goal was 6.0, so you lose. Here’s a scarlet ‘L’ to wear on your shirt. I’m raising your health insurance premiums by 40%.”

Many of my peers have done the math and know that even with the penalties that are coming, they can “do nothing,” see one or two more patients a day, and come out far ahead of their colleagues who are on the MU hamster wheel. Could the unintended consequence of ARRA and healthcare reform be the downfall of Medicare and decreased health outcomes for our growing senior population? Will it be the final blow to an already ailing primary care workforce? Will it be little more than a windfall for technology interests and consultants?

Only time will tell. But I leave you to ponder on the closing lines of the book.

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.

E-mail Dr. Jayne.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 5/16/11

When I started as a solo practice physician, if someone had told me that someday I would be able to have actual conversations about the business side of the house, I would have told them they were crazy. As a naïve postgraduate, I actually believed that most of practice would be about caring for patients. Tincture of time and a few rides on the revenue cycle roller coaster quickly proved otherwise. (No one likes going bankrupt, which is a real danger for small practices these days).

Knowing other providers have also had this experience, it shouldn’t have been surprising to me that business-related articles on HIStalk have generated quite a bit of feedback. In a recent EPtalk, I talked a bit about the need for office-based physicians to work on maximizing their use of practice management systems as a prelude to maximizing their use of electronic health records.

One reader asks:

When determining the first pass clean claims rate, do you count as ‘unclean’ a claim that (1) doesn’t make it through the EDI/clearinghouse scrubber (rejected), or (2) makes it through the clearinghouse/scrubber but is then denied by insurance (e.g., wrong coding, more medical information needed, etc)? I have seen a clean claims rate calculation as being just those rejected by the scrubbers, but I have also seen it where it includes every claim that wasn’t paid with only one touch.

I have to rely on my anonymous celebrity claims expert Bianca Billinghouse, who responds:

First pass is defined as a clean claim when it makes it through the practice management system’s claims scrubber as well as the clearinghouse. If it doesn’t make it through the clearinghouse, this is what we term a rejection. The office staff typically didn’t run their claim edits and it was caught by the clearinghouse. These count against the practice. If it makes it all the way through to insurance and results in a denial, depending on the reason, then it falls into controllable or not controllable denial. We see this often with eligibility, even though we are attempting to do this upon check-in.

I also got a fair amount of feedback on last week’s Curbside Consult about evaluation of practice management systems and their readiness for 5010. Several readers suggested other organizations as sources for evaluating practice management systems, such as KLAS or AC Group.

Another wrote with an interesting perspective on 5010 compliance, which I thought I’d share:

The new 5010 standard, in the short run, is the same old data repackaged a slightly different way from the 4010 standard. The truth is that if you send your claims via a clearinghouse in the short run, you don’t need to do anything. The clearinghouse and the insurance companies need to be able to exchange data in the 5010 format by January of 2012, and many companies are doing testing now through the end of the year. The reason that a provider doesn’t need to stress about this is the actual new data from the provider — i.e. ICD-10 codes — don’t go into effect until 2013.

Software companies, as you can imagine, use any change as a way to sell an upgrade or new release, and most of my clients are told you must do this or that. Whenever you are told you must do something by a software company, nine times out of ten you probably don’t. If you’re an office that sends all your own claims yourself direct to all the insurance companies, you may need an upgrade by January 2012. If you use a clearinghouse or a billing service, you probably have another year until your software needs to accommodate ICD10 codes. If you’re looking at a $2,000 upgrade vs. paying a clearinghouse $50 per month to take care of things for you, that is your choice.

Considering that my primary ambulatory system is with a vendor that doesn’t charge for upgrades (they’re included in maintenance), I have no skin in the game on upgrading vs. not upgrading as a cost-saving maneuver. Interestingly though, the same day I received that e-mail, I also received my snail mail copy of American Medical News with the headline, “Not electronic-claim compliant? Then expect no payments in 2012.”

The article mentions that 5010 requires submission of nine-digit ZIP codes on claims, which I suppose a clearinghouse with the postal database can “plug” as the claims pass through. It also includes the ability to “distinguish between principal diagnosis, admitting diagnosis, external cause of injury, and patient reason for visit codes” which I can’t imagine a clearinghouse being able to manipulate unless I’m not understanding what that means. (Damn it Jim, I’m a doctor, not a biller!)

However, 5010 is also a precursor to ICD-10. I worry that physicians who think they can delay the upgrades for 5010 adoption will unwittingly delay progress towards adoption of the new coding standard, which is already anticipated to be an extremely difficult transition for physicians.

Of course, another conversation with Bianca was in order:

He’s obviously using the clearinghouse spin, touting that they will take care of everything. Ultimately, it’s still the provider’s responsibility to comply with the mandates. I wouldn’t feel comfortable relying solely on my clearinghouse to map/plug the required loops/segments. He’s right that clearinghouses help in the process, but what will the clearing house do when its clients don’t get their claims paid because the primary payer wants 5010 and the secondary wants 4010 or even paper?

The American Medical News article goes as far as recommending that practices increase cash reserves and consider lines of credit to buffer potential rejections after the switch, which certainly doesn’t do anything to reduce physician anxiety. Personally, I’m extremely thankful that Bianca is looking out for my colleagues and me (no one ever gives the billing / claims / collections folks the credit they deserve). But I still I think I might have to temper my anxiety over ICD-10 with a nice Riesling.

E-mail Dr. Jayne.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 5/9/11

My large healthcare system, like many, is in the business of doing everything possible to make friends with independent physician practices. The average primary care physician drives several million dollars in ancillary revenues each year, so we can’t afford not to.

Our system offers discounted access to our EHR product for affiliated physicians. Although we have quite a few takers, many are still skeptical. After all, they’re independent for a reason. If they really wanted to buddy up, they would have been purchased long ago.

In a continuing effort to woo these last few holdouts, I was tasked with checking out some of the resources available to independent physicians seeking an EHR or practice management systems. Since Inga mentioned the new MGMA/AMA effort to create an online directory of practice management systems that are compliant with the 5010 standard, I decided to check it out.

I must have spent too much time with adolescent relatives over Mother’s Day, because my response to the directory is “lame, lame, lame.”

The directory lists only 20 vendors. Some of them aren’t even software companies – one lists its product as “Consulting and Implementation of several PM/EMR”s” [typo on parentheses left in on purpose.] As an AMA and MGMA member, I was embarrassed by this document. Version numbers included “n/a” and “current”, which I found hysterical.

Really? If this data would have been gathered by my intern, I would have sent him back to his cube in shame. They have a link on the page that if you don’t see your vendor, you should e-mail and they will ask the vendor to participate. Does neither the AMA nor the MGMA have the ability to identify the top 100 vendors and survey them to create a useful guide?

Now mind you, none of the vendors I use are on the current directory, so I can’t verify the accuracy of the listings. But in checking out a couple of the individual detailed profiles, I learned the following:

• Cerner PowerWorks PM has 250 customers and doesn’t support Microsoft .NET, does not use a “modern and widely supported relational database for the underlying data structure,” and the database is not ODBC compliant. Kind of a surprise.
• Ingenix CareTracker has one box checked that the “modern and widely supported relational database” is standard. Another is checked that says “does not provide.”
• MCA Systems CodeHERO product was about to get a “best product name” prize until I noticed it “does not provide” the following: appointment scheduling, resource scheduling, claims generation on the CMS 1500 or UB 04, or ability to maintain payer lists including fee schedules. How exactly is this a practice management system?
• Allscripts, GE, eClinical Works, NextGen, Sage, McKesson, and Athena are all missing in action on this list.

If I were a vendor not listed, I’d e-mail them at busdevelop@mgma.com and tell them to get with the program. If I were a listed vendor, I’d certainly double check my data and find out who in my organization submitted it, if it’s not accurate.

So what’s the point of all this? First, I always like to let Inga know I’m reading her material. HIStalk girlfriends have to stick together, you know? Second, whether I work for a monolithic organization or not, I’m still a small-practice physician by training and I care what happens to my friends in the trenches. Third, large organizations like MGMA and AMA who want to actually help said physicians in the trenches need to do better.

Do you have a better source of info for physicians who are shopping for a new PM system or want to verify that theirs will handle 5010? I still have to impress a hospital president with a fancy PowerPoint presentation. E-mail me.

E-mail Dr. Jayne.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 5/2/11

This has been a bit of a crazy week for me, with entirely too many hours at the hospital. I had a pounding headache after a particularly chaotic shift. After taking the proverbial two aspirin and trying to unwind with some quality Internet surfing, I came across a blurb about the noise levels in hospitals. Could this be the culprit?

Digging deeper into the Chicago Tribune, the article cited “alarm fatigue,” a significant safety issue for hospitals. If you haven’t experienced this personally and you live in the IT or medical device worlds, you’ve probably heard clinicians complaining about what the article describes as “incessantly beeping devices.” I definitely met this face to face while rounding on the cardiac floor, where every patient has a heart monitor.

The Trib mentions the Food and Drug Administration’s responsibility for regulating medical devices, and the scope of its reach is broad. Ever wonder what all they regulate? It’s much more than X-ray machines and prosthetic knees. A list of the various regulated devices is here. I had no idea they regulated some of the things they apparently regulate. Maybe I can use some of them for trivia at my next cocktail party.

Based on their extensive reach, I’m actually pretty surprised they haven’t yet gotten into the electronic health records arena. Many people are calling for FDA regulation. The Tribune article brings up some important points, however. FDA, in its regulation of devices, hasn’t been able to find the “sweet spot” between specifying the appropriate alarms to adequately support clinical care while reducing the fatigue caused by overly sensitive parameters.

The piece cites a noise researcher from McMaster University as saying, “People don’t pay attention to alarms; they exist as much for legal liability reasons as much as for actually doing anything for patients.” If we have this situation with devices that have been regulated for years, what does that say about the ability of the FDA to improve the performance of electronic documentation systems?

As cited in the article, ERCI Institute has a top ten list of technology hazards. For 2011, alarm-related adverse events is number two, right between radiation overdose (!) and cross-contamination from flexible endoscopes (yuck). Data loss and “other health IT complications” is number five. This is a pretty serious list: surgical fires and misconnected intravenous lines also made the cut.

The Chicago Tribune isn’t the only major outlet to report on this issue. The Boston Globe ran a piece in February. Their investigation revealed 942 alarms per day on a 15-bed unit at Johns Hopkins Hospital — a rate of one critical alarm every 90 seconds. In studies, up to 85% of alarms have been shown to be false alarms. The FDA is apparently stretched thin already, failing to follow up on case reviews with manufacturers in some cases.

Organizations other than the FDA have gotten into the alarm fray. Joint Commission made alarm recommendations part of its National Patient Safety Goals in 2004, but dropped them in 2005. Some safety experts have lobbied to block hospital staff from turning off critical alarms, a move that was rejected by an industry working group due to caregiver objections and the need to “permit the clinical staff to solve the problem in peace and quiet.”

As a clinician, I experience alarm fatigue every day. Cardiac monitors start beeping when patients turn or cough. IV machines beep when infusions are completed (even if the next infusion isn’t due to start for another 23 hours). My hospital’s EHR warns me that the diabetes drug I’m about to prescribe should be used with caution because it might lower blood sugar. Kind of sad, since that’s the main reason I’m prescribing diabetes medications in the first place — to lower blood sugar levels!

I’d love to see some standards put in place. Standards created by rational clinicians based on data and science, not based on the risk of lawsuits or on anecdotal experiences. The FDA doesn’t seem to have a track record in this area and they don’t seem to have the horsepower to take on regulation of another industry. As a physician, if they had additional funding, I’d like to see them tackle the dietary supplement industry first. How many patients are harmed by taking entirely unregulated substances marketed by greedy manufacturers who can say whatever they want because their product is classified as a food rather than as a drug?

Other federal agencies charged with regulating or advising in these areas haven’t fared much better. The United States Preventive Services Task Force is charged with recommending preventive health care services based on evidence-driven criteria. However, their recommendations have been blasted (and undermined) by various disease-centric organizations and professional groups and even the payment policies of CMS. It’s hard to explain to a patient why a test isn’t justified based on mountains of clinical evidence when they can counter with, “Then why does Medicare cover it?”

Let’s say we’re going to tackle alarm fatigue. Who can do it, how should they do it, and where are we going to get the money to pay for it? I’m interested to hear your ideas.

E-mail Dr. Jayne.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 4/25/11

In the last several weeks, tornadoes and other severe storms have ripped through various parts of the country. Based on a frantic phone call I received from a medical school colleague, this seems to be a good opportunity for a physician-friendly discussion of disaster preparedness for healthcare information technology. For those of you who are serious IT professionals, this may be boring, but on the other hand it may be a good conversation starter to e-mail (or even print if you have to) for the physicians in your lives.

Downtime and Disaster Recovery 101

The most important part of successfully dealing with an outage of your electronic health record is to have a plan. Most practices need both short-term and long-term plans, whether you’re in a well-known hurricane zone or tornado alley or not. Lots of things can happen: floods, fires, and earthquakes. No one is exempt and everyone needs a plan.

Downtime usually refers to a time when the system is unavailable, whether planned or unplanned. Downtimes can happen for a variety of reasons. Unplanned downtimes may include a local power outage, loss of Internet connectivity, or other nonspecific system issues that keep physicians from fully using the EHR. They may be limited — perhaps it’s just an outage of e-prescribing or faxing — or may affect the system across the board.

Limited downtime events often have simple workarounds. For example, if e-prescribing or faxing is down, one can always print prescriptions or documents, call medication orders to the pharmacy, or worst-case scenario (ugh) use a paper prescription pad and a pen. Loss of Internet connectivity can be overcome by using a cellular / wireless Internet card, provided the practice has planned ahead and such cards are available for use. If the local wireless network in the practice is out of commission, users may be able to plug in, assuming there are ports available.

For unplanned downtimes, unless they have in-house IT support 24×7, practices should ensure key personnel have checklists for troubleshooting issues and phone lists for Internet service providers, vendor help desks, etc. Make sure multiple people in the practice know how and where the information is stored — don’t count on a single employee to be the point of knowledge. Murphy’s Law dictates that if something goes wrong, it will go wrong when that employee is unavailable.

Planned downtimes are usually limited downtimes. This may include hardware upgrades, software upgrades, weekly or monthly maintenance, etc. When planning a downtime, physicians need to discuss their willingness to work without full access to the EHR. Many physicians may be willing to print summaries for patients who may be scheduled during an upgrade and ‘wing it’ for others. For some, being without data is unacceptable, and the office must be closed.

Careful planning can keep physicians from having to make this decision. Many vendors offer solutions where a copy of the database can be saved to a local computer and accessed in a read-only manner during an upgrade. There are several third-party solutions to this problem, and if you are interested in this for your practice, allow some time (often a few months) to make sure this is in place before a planned downtime.

Disaster recovery usually refers to a situation where something very, very bad has happened. This can include physical destruction of the practice, its servers, and its equipment due to a natural disaster. If the IT infrastructure is physically destroyed, it may be weeks before the practice can be up and running. Disasters can also occur due to poor planning, as my friend learned.

Practices need a plan to create backup copies of the data in the event of a disaster. If you use a Web-based or hosted EHR, often your vendor takes care of backups for you. However, you need to understand the interval at which backups are done. Daily, weekly, monthly? To determine how frequently you need to do a backup, ask yourself: how much data are you willing to lose? For a busy practice, backups should be done daily and practices should consider other strategies to continuously back up data throughout the day (but that’s beyond Disaster Recovery 101, so I’ll save the discussion of transaction log shipping vs. database mirroring for another day).

Backups should not be stored in the office. Think it through: if your office catches on fire and the backup copy is at the office, that’s not a great idea. Backups need to be stored securely under appropriate climate conditions — be mindful of temperature, humidity, etc. There is one important thing about backups that doesn’t cross most physician minds: the need to test the backup to make sure it works. Your IT professionals can do this by taking the backup copy of the database and restoring it to a test system, then checking it to make sure data is current and comprehensive.

Unfortunately, the solo physician who called me this morning learned this the hard way. When the power went out and the battery backup failed, the database was impacted. Her vendor recommended that they restore the database from the most recent backup. When this was attempted, the backup contained less than half the data they expected it to. Not a great situation. Although she was fortunate that the EF-4 tornado didn’t touch her building, it’s going to be a challenge to recover from the loss of so much data.

So physicians, heed this cautionary tale. Take a moment to discuss your downtime and disaster recovery strategies with your IT support staff, whether you work in a solo practice or for a large health system. Don’t be afraid of stepping on the IT team’s toes — many are proud of the downtime strategies they’ve created and will be happy to talk about them. If there is no written plan, make it a point to create and document the processes you need to practice should the system be unavailable. Make sure key staff have copies of the plan, and practice it. Use regular maintenance windows as an opportunity to practice what you would do if an unplanned outage occurred.

Preparing for system outages should be a regular part of the life of the practice, no different than fire drills, tornado drills, or the like. The odds of something bad happening may be slim, but if you’re in disaster’s crosshairs, you’ll be glad you took the time to prepare for the worst and to protect your patients and your practice.

E-mail Dr. Jayne.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 4/18/11

I try not to waste too much time on the Internet, but keeping an eye out for interesting stories on health and technology is an occupational hazard. How could I not read a piece with the headline Playboy Mansion Illness Traced to Hot Tub Bacteria when it crossed my screen? Apparently our old friend Legionella (the bacteria that causes Legionnaires’ disease) was found in a hot tub at the Playboy Mansion after scores of visitors were sickened.

As if a story about hot tubbing with Hef isn’t tawdry enough, epidemiologists were no doubt engrossed when the case was presented last week at the Centers for Disease Control’s annual conference in Atlanta. So what does this have to do with health and technology? Well, it seems that epidemiologists used social media to contact the 400+ people who were at a fundraising event where they came into contact with the bacteria.

In other news, the Associated Press reports that Odd Work Schedules Pose Risk to Health. From my experiences as an intern and resident, I could have written that one — it’s not good for the caregivers or their patients. According to Dr. Charles Czeisler, chief of sleep medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, 30-50% of night shift workers admit to falling asleep at least once a week while working.

Although the article highlights findings related to recent issues with air traffic controllers snoozing on the job, the facts play to all of us in healthcare and IT, also. Czeisler states that taking work home on BlackBerrys and computers as well as the 24×7 availability of work and entertainment options contributes to sleep issues.

Somehow I missed this in my recent studies for my medical board recertification exam, but night shift workers are more likely to have chronic intestinal and heart diseases. Apparently, the World Health Organization has also identified shift work as a probable carcinogen. Not good news for those of us in the business of 24×7 technology and patient care activities, or the patients either. Having been sleep deprived for nearly five years during my training, I understand the near misses (and sometimes real misses) that can happen in the middle of the night when the thought process starts to get fuzzy.

These types of situations are great for employing technology as an additional safety net for our patients. Long hours aren’t going away (nor are distractions, overloaded schedules, nursing staff burdened with regulatory nonsense that detracts from patient care, or any of the other dozens of things that impact clinical decision-making). But well-placed clinical tools (like the Thomson Reuters tools mentioned by Dr. Gregg on HIStalk Practice)  can really make a difference.

Personally, I’d much rather have my anesthesiologist calculating drugs and dosages in a well-crafted electronic record than doing equations on the leg of his scrub pants (which, thank goodness, I haven’t seen in a long time). However, the systems have to be well designed, easy to use, and accurate if they’re going to make a difference. Users have to commit to attending training, using the system properly, and not short-cutting steps. IT teams have to keep the systems available (not to mention happy and healthy) continuously. Otherwise, make sure you have your scrubs on — and your favorite ballpoint pen.

E-mail Dr. Jayne.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 4/11/11

There’s been lots of buzz this week about the Care Connectivity Consortium. This initiative by Geisinger Health System, Kaiser Permanente, Mayo Clinic, Intermountain Healthcare, and Group Health Cooperative has been noted everywhere from The New York Times to Yahoo and MSN.

I can’t wait to see how this collaboration unfolds. Those of us who have spent the last several years knee-deep in Health Information Exchange know how difficult it can be to actually make this happen.

I’m interested in seeing details on the pre-work: consent, governance, and ownership. It’s challenging enough to get a productive HIE live that meets the legal hurdles of a single state, let alone meeting those of a disparate group covering Pennsylvania, California, Minnesota, Utah, and Washington (which just represent the headquarters states, not all the states where care is delivered, which will also have to be addressed).

The warm and fuzzy scenario presented in The New York Times piece: “A person walks into a clinic in Phoenix, say, and, with permission, her records from her hometown physician’s office in San Francisco are efficiently summoned with a mouse-click.” If only it were that easy!

Having been involved with attempts to jumpstart a regional HIE, I know that wading through the legalese for the patient consent and trying to fit it on a single page reminded me of the scene in the cult classic The Princess Bride, where the bad guy has a machine that sucks years of your life away.

The consent language for many data exchange projects can be nearly unintelligible for the lay person. I suspect the forms will become “just another form” that patients shuffle through and sign if they want to receive care, whether they understand it or not.

(Kind of like the paperwork in the Emergency Department – do they think patients actually read that? I don’t think so. They sign it because they are sick, hurting, and in need of care. When you just want to see your doctor, you don’t care about the HIPAA Notice of Privacy Practices, Patient Financial Responsibility statement, or anything else other than being treated.)

I’d like to see the details of how they’re going to do this. I’m sure it will be more than the proverbial single click – like documenting the patient’s consent or opt-in status, validating patient identifiers, etc. And once you have the patient identified, how useful will it be? I hope the Consortium goes “all in” with this and uses fully discrete data that can be exchanged and consumed by receiving physicians’ EHRs, not just another view vault application that’s the electronic equivalent of asking physicians to review paper documents from multiple institutions.

I applaud the groups’ ability to work out shared goals among the CEOs before it became too public. Kaiser’s CEO George Halvorson is quoted as saying, “The CEOs had to make sure the CIOs didn’t think this was crazy or impossible.” Probably a good idea, as this may have been a non-starter if too many people were at the table before the basics were agreed upon or if the CIOs opposed it.

But now that the basic agreement is done, what about the CMIOs and the actually physicians and caregivers who will have to use the system on a daily basis? I hope their input will be considered starting immediately, if this has not already happened.

How real-time will it really be? How are they going to handle corrections and errors? What about monitoring and maintenance of potential duplicate patients? Sensitive information, such as drug use, HIV status, sexual history, and the like? Patients who change their opt-in/opt-out status to avoid sharing certain information?

The devil will definitely be in the details. The answers to these questions, coupled with ease of use, will determine the success of this initiative (assuming the technical piece can be carried out in a timely and fiscally responsible way).

The New York Times pointed out that the groups also have insurance products. Collaboration could be seen as an attempt to compete with the lines of UnitedHealth, Aetna, and Wellpoint. Halvorson is quoted as saying, “This is totally focused on care.”

I really want this to work and be successful in a big way. This could pave the way for many other collaborative efforts that could be game-changers for the physicians in the trenches. The groups intend to exchange some data by the end of this year, so it should be fun to watch.

If any of the CMIOs from the Consortium organizations are HIStalk readers, I’d love to chat with you about the gory/geeky details of the project (preferably over a glass of wine and some chorizo fondue, but I’ll settle for Skype). Drop me a note if you’re interested in chatting.

E-mail Dr. Jayne.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 4/4/11

Surprise, surprise. At least someone in the federal government agrees with the rest of us that there is a conflict between the two CMS programs for e-prescribing. American Medical News reports that the Government Accountability Office has criticized CMS for “failing to align the two programs.”

Practically speaking, this means that some physicians are buying standalone e-prescribing systems (or using free ones) to avoid a Medicare penalty in the future, even though they may be in the process of implementing a certified EHR to take advantage of the Meaningful Use program. The article covers how various groups are lobbying to have this situation remedied. But in response to a reader question, I also emailed the HIStalk Medicine Cabinet for their thoughts. Thank you to all the members of the Medicine Cabinet who responded with your thoughts on this issue.

Dr. Jayne,

You offered to answer questions about the incentive programs, so here is mine. It may sound complex and obscure, but it is actually relevant to a large number of physicians, so please bear with me.

1. The e-prescribing incentive turns into a penalty in 2012. The penalty is determined by whether or not you use e-prescribing this year. You must use it and report the appropriate code in the first half of 2011 to avoid penalties in 2012-15.
2. The largest portion of the Meaningful Use incentive is earned for 2011.
3. According to CMS, you cannot get both of these payments; if you get the eRx incentive, you cannot get MU, and vice versa.

If you use the G-codes in early 2011 to avoid the penalties in later years, do you eliminate your chance of getting the (much larger) Meaningful Use incentive? Or are you better off not using the eRX codes, taking those penalties over the years, but getting the MU money? It seems that we must make a choice.

Can you offer a solution to this dilemma?

Thanks very much,

Perplexed

Respondent 1

On the question at hand, it’s true that you can’t qualify for both incentives in 2011. However, you can delay the launch of your MU odyssey until 2012 and still qualify for the full MU incentive – it will just be shifted out one year. If you want to maximize the incentives across both programs, go for the eRX incentive in 2011 and start MU in 2012. Just make sure that you don’t let your first MU adoption year slip into 2013 — that’s when you’ll start to see decreases in the total MU payment stream.

Another note: due to a bureaucratic snag, if you choose to go for MU in 2011 and give up the eRX incentive, you still have to check the box on the eRX incentive program in order to avoid the penalties in the out years. Such are the wild and wacky ways of federal government programs!

Respondent 2

Since you can’t receive eRX and MU Medicare payments in the program year same year, I would report on eRx in 2011 to avoid later penalties and then start MU reporting in 2012. Ignoring the time value of money issue, one is still eligible for the maximum MU payment by starting in 2012. This approach assumes that all of the money will be available in the out years of the program (I think it will, but if you don’t think the money will be there, it would then make more sense to skip eRx and just pursue the MU dollars).

Just in case there is some confusion, you can get both eRx and Medicaid payments in the same year. It is only Medicare where you must pick.

Respondent 3

This is a perfect example of the left hand not knowing what the right hand will do.

The real crux of all of this is that you have to being willing to see CMS-sponsored patients (Medicare / Medicaid). The issue I have with both these regulations is that most practices cannot even survive financially if they see the required amount of patients that are needed to fulfill criteria to get the incentive payments.

As a pathologist, the e-prescribing and Meaningful Use do not apply. My wife is a psychiatrist and I spend a lot of time with her IT systems. As a solo practitioner, she has simply opted out. But I think if she were participating, the Meaningful Use payments are more money depending on the volume of patients you see.

My guess is that no one will have the volume required. Now don’t get me wrong, there are valuable other reasons to do e-prescribing or an EMR. My wife is using an EMR and will be switching to e-prescribing now that the Controlled Substances Act has allowed it for electronic submission. Before, it didn’t make sense to be doing manual prescribing for controlled psychiatric meds and electronic for others. She is not using either for incentive programs as she doesn’t qualify for either.

The bottom line: physicians should not chase the money, but do what is right for their patients.

Respondent 4

Meaningful Use incentive — total possible $63,750 for EPs (or thereabouts)

eRx incentive — 2% incentive program (2% of the group practice’s total estimated Medicare Part B Physician Fee Schedule). This falls to 99% of PFS in 2012, 98.5% of PFS in 2013, and 98% of PFS in 2014.

I’d make the assumption that both are not available, since that is the supposition, and calculate which provides the greatest return (this does not take account of cost of compliance both in pure monetary terms as well as disruption / effort / resources).

The numbers will depend on how long you think this lasts or applies, but I would assume at least six years (given the MU current timeline payout).

Respondent 5

The maximum incentives for the e-prescribing program were available in the earlier years of the program, 2009 and 2010 (2% of allowed charges). For 2011, the incentive is 1%.

True, you cannot receive e-rx payment concurrently with EHR incentives. But if you decided to participate in the e-prescribing program and collect incentives and not participate in the EHR program until 2012, that’s OK. You just can’t accept incentives from both in the same year (i.e. participate and collect incentives in e-rx program and EHR program in 2011).

Where it has gotten confusing is that while you cannot "double dip," so to speak, by collecting incentives for both at the same time, you are still required by CMS to report the G codes for the e-rx program during the first six months of 2011 just to avoid the penalty for 2012. It is completely permissible to collect EHR incentives in 2011, report the G code for e-rx for the first six months of 2011 to avoid the e-rx 2012 penalty, AND collect incentives for the EHR program for participation in 2011.

The other thing is there is no registration process for the e-prescribing program, but you must register for the EHR program. If you register for the EHR program and report the G code for the e-prescribing, CMS should know that you intend to collect the EHR incentives.

CMS has a FAQ on this. It doesn’t touch 100% on this, but does to some degree.

So there you have it. Providers should make their decisions based on the facts available at this point in time. It’s not clear whether there will be any regulatory, administrative, or legislative remedy to this any time soon. For those of you who are pediatricians seeing greater than 20% Medicaid patients, or other specialties seen greater than 30%, take your Medicaid incentive checks and run! Be glad you don’t have to deal with this silly business and be kind to the rest of us who do.

E-mail Dr. Jayne.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 3/28/11

Dr. Jayne interviews Doug Farrago, MD

Earlier this month on HIStalk Practice, I posted a piece called “Meaningful Use: 15 Things Your Practice Can (and Should) Do Now.” I jokingly included an Item 16, which was a suggestion to immediately identify a CMHO for the organization – a Chief Medical Humor Officer.

CMHOs are hard to come by, so I wanted to introduce you to the self-proclaimed King of Medicine, Doug Farrago. Doug is editor and publisher of the Placebo Journal, often cited as “the Mad Magazine of medical humor.” Since starting the Placebo Journal in 2001, he has also published a compilation of stories, The Placebo Chronicles, as well as penning the Placebo Gazette e-newsletter and the Placebo Journal Blog. A man of many faces, he also stars in Placebo Television.

According to his website, “Dr. Farrago has risen to national prominence in the publishing world by providing a humorous outlet for physicians while fighting back against the medical axis of evil (pharma, lawyers, insurance, and a whole lot more.)”

I’ve been reading Placebo Journal since issue #2 and have also been a contributor, so I’m a bit biased. But given the sheer bulk of guidelines, regulations, mandates, programs, requirements, and dictates that most of us in healthcare IT deal with on a daily basis, being able to draw humor from all of it is a rare talent.

USNews.com once called Placebo Journal “raunchy, adolescent, and very funny.” When creating it, what was your objective?

The goal was to make people laugh. Plain and simple. The magazine is intended to distract docs from the crap we have to deal with. The stories we tell, like in the old doctor’s lounge, are what keeps us going. It enables us to commiserate.

How did you become King of Medicine?

Initially, I had posted an editorial in the Boston Globe about something ridiculous about our healthcare system that they wrote about. I wanted to piss off the ivory tower docs down there that pontificate on everything as if they are experts, but yet haven’t seen a patient in years. I made the point that maybe I should decide everything and should be named King of Medicine. It just stuck as I continued with the Placebo Journal.

You’ve also been an inventor and entrepreneur. How have those experiences impacted your ability to continue delivering quality medical care in a changing healthcare environment?

Absolutely … not. This is a job that is continually being bastardized by the idiots who have are trying to game the system. More and more people are jumping in the mix getting between the patient and the doctor. The only way to fix that is to get creative and go cash pay. I haven’t made the jump yet as I am owned by a hospital. It is really tough to get off the stripper pole.

How has technology impacted your practice in the last 10 years?

There have been some great advances with the ability to get information in real time. It has, unfortunately, opened up some bad stuff as well. We are entering a world of “industrialized medicine.” Mooooooo……

Do you use an electronic health record (EHR)? How has it changed the way you practice medicine?

EMRs are great for many things. The positive part is that I have info at my fingertips that was tough to get to in the old days. It is the never ending f#cking clicks and boxes that I can do without.

What’s your funniest EHR story?

I don’t remember one in particular. In general, I have been using an EMR for four years. During that time, I have lost the ability to make eye contact with people. Is that a new disease?

You’ve been fighting the establishment for some time. I understand you were once asked to leave the American Academy of Family Physicians annual meeting after covertly handing out copies of the Placebo Journal. The next year, you appeared in the exhibit hall in lederhosen. What’s next?

Unfortunately, our organizations have sold us all out. I am older and maybe a little wiser now. At this point, I just want to get people to lighten up a little and make a point in the process. Or just screw with their heads a little.

You used to work with professional boxers. Based on that experience, do you have any advice for physicians and their staff members as they try to navigate the CMS program for Meaningful Use?

THROW IN THE TOWEL AND WALK AWAY!!

As an employed physician, are you required to participate in the Meaningful Use program or are you able to opt out?

Right now, I am playing the game. My goal is to opt out of this garbage as soon as I can. Then I am going to wear a t-shirt that says, “I got your Meaningful Use right here” to the next big conference.

Although the Placebo Journal has always been a print publication, you recently made the decision to go strictly digital. I understand the unreasonable costs of utilizing a government-run agency had something to do with that. Although it was just the US Postal Service in this case, can you draw any parallels to what’s going on with other government forays into healthcare?

There are 82 federal programs dealing with teacher quality in this country. How is that working out for us? The same will happen with medicine. It is all bloat.

The local people at the USPS are great, but the fact is, no one mails letters anymore. Why are stamps so expensive? Why were there tons of people not getting my journal via snail mail every month? Too much government does not equal better service. Sorry, folks. The less middlemen in the healthcare system, the better.

You also do public speaking. Have you ever spoken on healthcare information technology topics? Any key thoughts you’d like to share with HIStalk’s readers?

I have not spoken on HIT, but my talks would still work as I can easily poke fun at what technology is doing to us. Besides, it would make you folks stop and think for a while. Maybe, just maybe, too much technology is bad. There is a human component to patient care, you know. An EMR can’t do a rectal exam … yet.

E-mail Dr. Jayne.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 3/21/11

It’s officially spring and there was a full moon over the weekend to boot. I’m not sure what I was thinking when I decided to work this one.

One of the downsides of being a CMIO type is that I’ve had to give up any semblance of a “normal” practice. Most of what I do these days is emergency department coverage or urgent care. One of the things I enjoy doing, though, is Locum Tenens work. If you haven’t heard of that, basically it means that you’re for hire to anyone who’s willing to meet your terms. Sometimes Locum work is fun, because you can take an assignment at an exotic location or practice in a way you normally don’t, like with the Indian Health Service or the military.

In my case, though, I usually Locum in my own metropolitan area. Folks like to hire me because I’m proficient in several EHR systems and can hit the ground running. (Thank you, moonlighting shifts during residency! Thank you, best of breed strategy!) In addition to the variety, this lets me see under the hood of other systems and experience for myself how other practices are using technology to perform patient care.

You might think it would be a competitive intelligence issue — that practices would be reluctant to use someone like me because I might steal their secrets. Frankly, they’re just happy to get someone who can jump right in and they don’t have to pay extra hours for training time. Most of the time it’s fun, but sometimes it’s very humbling.

Musings of a Mercenary Doctor

Training and staff proficiency makes a huge difference. There’s one group where I cover acute/sick visits. The physician shift splits two nursing shifts, so each physician works with two different nurses. I only work there once a quarter and it’s a large group with multiple locations, so I haven’t met everyone.

Recently I had the Jekyll and Hyde day. My morning nurse was spectacular – every patient history was nearly 100% complete, all medications were reconciled, and needed labs and diagnostic studies were pre-ordered based on standing orders. We rocked through 38 patients, too good to be true.

Remember that scene in Titanic where the crew in the crow’s nest shouts, “Iceberg! Dead ahead!”? Well, someone should have shouted that during shift change.

I spent the next couple of hours absolutely treading water and gasping for air. The semi-retired nurse who was staffing me apparently thought free-texting everything was a good idea, effectively sabotaging any smartness of the EHR workflow to select the right documentation forms or to share information between today’s symptoms and the patient’s previous notes.

Instead of reconciling medications she just entered new medications, creating duplicates. No tests were pre-ordered, making for a backup in radiology after I sent three patients simultaneously just to get the exam rooms clear for new patients. Although the volume had slowed significantly, it felt like we couldn’t get ahead. I kept focusing on the fact that at least I got to get in my lifeboat and go home at the end of the day.

Shirley is super-nice and does phone triage better than anyone I’ve worked with in a long time. She knows exactly how to counsel patients and is excellent with procedures. By late afternoon, the other physicians were gone except the two of us doing evening coverage.

According to my colleague, because she’s well-liked and is close to retirement, no one has the heart to either tell her that her misuse of the EHR is sabotaging the docs or that she needs retraining. Although they grouse about her at every provider meeting, they’ve decided they’re OK with it because they don’t want to hurt her feelings or rock the boat. The younger nurses don’t want to work nights and weekends and they can’t afford to lose her.

One of the great things about being a mercenary is not having to deal with office politics and being able to push the limits a bit. I decided to ask her how she thought the shift was going. She admitted being aggravated because she’s “not good with computers” and said she’d been frustrated since their go-live last year. I decided to dig a little deeper and see what I could do to help.

Turns out she’s semi-retired and works evenings and weekends because she helps care for her grandchild during the week. It also turns out that the practice did all the staff training last year during the morning, while many physicians were on hospital rounds, so they wouldn’t have to cancel patients. She never had formal training on the system. They asked one of the 21 year-old medical assistants to let her “shadow” and “learn the system” one afternoon.

Are you kidding me? I can only imagine what that was like for Shirley, trying to catch up after the fact and trying to learn from someone a third her age who was also learning the system.

I asked her if I could show her a couple of small things that might make her life (and selfishly, mine) easier. In just a couple of minutes between patients, I taught her how to reconcile medications and worked with her 1:1 on the next few patients. By the end of the shift, I had fantastic med lists and she felt like she had accomplished something. We spent a few minutes talking about how the logic of the system works and what happens downstream when you free-text. She honestly had no idea the havoc she was causing.

I cornered the other physician when we hit a lull. He was surprised. He had no idea Shirley hadn’t been trained. The docs had abdicated any responsibility during the EHR implementation, leaving it up to the office manager. He didn’t know about her work situation or what was behind it. I could tell he felt bad for complaining about Shirley rather than figuring out a solution. I told him what I showed her and what Shirley was now able to do.

In short, I spent about thirty minutes training/mentoring her rather than doing her job for the rest of the shift. I was happy, she was happy, and you can bet the next physician she staffs will be happy. As I finished my notes and the last few patients were trickling out, the other doc was showing her how to access his medication favorites list so she could use it to enter medications on new patients.

I hope he’s able to help his partners understand the situation and get her the training she needs (and deserves). I ended up seeing over 60 patients that shift, but the most important “care” I delivered didn’t have an ICD-9 code attached to it. Even on hectic days with systems that don’t always work the way we want, remember to look out for each other.

E-mail Dr. Jayne.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 3/7/11

Welcome to HIStalk’s new Monday feature, Curbside Consult. For those of you not familiar with the term, a curbside consult happens when another physician wants to ask your opinion about something, but doesn’t want to write a formal consultation request in the chart or actually send the patient to see you.

Curbsides have a certain appeal for both sides. When busy subspecialists like infectious disease (ID) docs are in short supply, they don’t want their time wasted by what they consider simple questions, like validating an antibiotic selection for a hospitalized patient. If the request is made formally, they have to see the patient and write a note, when often it’s an answer they can just give off the top of their heads (and are happy to do so).

My favorite ID consultant requires that you call his cell phone to curbside him prior to writing a formal consultation request. Eighty percent of his business is in curbsides, because he likes to save the “real” consultations for patients who are truly complex. I think it’s also his way of having some semblance of a home life. If he formally consulted on everyone he was called about, he’d never see the outside of the hospital. (It probably would be a different story if there were ID specialists around every corner, but there aren’t, at least in my market.)

For those of us that ask for the occasional curbside, often the question is one that we know the answer to, but want a colleague to validate. Maybe it’s not something we see every day, or we want to confirm that we’re operating with the latest and greatest information.

The worst kind of curbside is when a non-physician tries to ask for one — also known as the Supermarket Consult. Definitely to be avoided, as no physician ever wants to try to diagnose a rash in the frozen foods aisle.

The worst one of these I ever experienced was when I worked for a small-town hospital that had a float in the town’s Founders’ Day parade. Waving and throwing candy from my Astroturf-covered perch (wearing a white coat and scrubs, no less) a patient stepped out of the crowd in the middle of the parade route and asked me if I had an update on new medications for constipation. (With patients like that, who needs HIPAA, anyway?)

On HIStalk, Curbside Consult is about sharing physician opinions on the hot topics, not only from me (Dr. Jayne), but from the HIStalk Medicine Cabinet. Response from potential Cabinet members has been good. I haven’t gotten back to everyone yet since I worked entirely too much this weekend, so stay tuned.

When Mr. H offered to run my posts on their own night, it was exciting, yet a little bit nerve-wracking. I appreciate the opportunity and think it will be a chance to have more focus on CMIO/CIO/CMO/physician topics independent of the news, rumors, and updates. And so, here we go!

A Study of an Enterprise Health Information System

Mr. HIStalk opened the door on this one in his Monday Morning Update, so I’m going to walk right through.

For those of you who haven’t seen it: Jon Patrick, Professor at the University of Sydney’s Health Information Technologies Research Laboratory, wrote about implementing Cerner FirstNet in emergency departments in New South Wales. 

(As an aside, you can take the CMIO out of clinic, but you can’t take the clinic out of Dr. Jayne. The author also had an article about extracting data from narrative pathology reports on melanoma patients, which I downloaded to read on my way to the beach later this month. Using optical character recognition and concept tags to gather data and improve care? Fabulous!)

I agree with Mr. H though. Forget Cerner, as this applies to vendors and applications that are too numerous to count. Being the person who often has to have the less-than-pleasant conversations with vendor CMOs and physicians when there are issues at my hospital, I’d like to share my observations.

Although there are some significant defects out there, many vendors are working hard to remedy these and to implement aggressive protocols to bake quality into their products and design defects out. The best of these organizations are adopting techniques long used by manufacturing to ensure quality. This is still a relatively emerging industry, though — some folks are building Model T Fords, while others are building models that will go for 200,000 miles.

Vendors are under the gun from clients and prospects to make their products pretty, which translates too frequently into something that might look nice but isn’t clinician-friendly, usable, or safe. Vendors are also pressured to make their systems “fully customizable,” which often means allowing users to do things which are, for lack of a better word, stupid. I’d love to see a rebuttal of the article addressing what parts of the system were implemented against Cerner advice or best practices.

Some additional thoughts:

• Too many systems allow clients to “customize” patient safety out of the implementation. When I learned that there was a preference in my system to disable allergy and drug interaction checking, I cringed. (This was years ago when I was but a mere Physician Champion, before some of my colleagues decided I was an “IT sellout” and had crossed from “us” to “them.”) Within a few months, some of my colleagues demanded that we allow users to turn it off. Their reasons (no kidding) included “I know what medications interact with each other” and “I know what the patient is taking, I don’t need the computer” and “I hate it, turn it the [bleep] off.” There’s no class in medical school that teaches you how to deal with peers who act like this. The only thing you can do is make sure your patients and loved ones don’t go see them.
• User errors can be reduced, but they can’t be eliminated. At our hospital, we aggressively track errors in documentation and look at trends between physician offices and across the system. Good staff training, low turnover, and accountability all lead to fewer errors. Surprise!
• Patients give bad information, which no amount of decision support or application design can fix. Until we have fully integrated interoperable platforms that remove human memory or manual data entry from the equation, this is going to be an issue. On the other hand, when everything is fully automated, errors can become magnified and nearly impossible to fix. Talk to anyone who’s been the victim of medical identity theft and you’ll know immediately how horrible this can be.
• The ability to review longitudinal patient data is sorely lacking in many systems. In this world of accountable care and shared risk, the concept of episodic care needs to die a quick death.
• Data integrity has to be paramount. It doesn’t matter how slick your user interface might be or how few clicks it takes to document — if the data gets vaporized, it’s game over. My first EHR had this handy little feature: the templates accommodated unlimited input, but the documents only accommodated X number of characters. Not knowing any better, I trusted my vendor (ha!) and didn’t discover this undocumented functionality until patients came in for follow up visits and many Assessment/Plan sections (traditionally done at the end of the note) were missing. My risk management consultant loved that one, let me tell you. On the other hand, that EHR was extremely easy to use, was highly standards-based, and had a workhorse scanning solution that I still miss. But it ate my notes, so it had to go.
• Several vendors still use design philosophies that revolve around the individual visions of key leaders regardless of user needs. Granted, they’re baking in the Meaningful Use requirements because they have to, but the world has changed and what was cool 20 years ago is no longer what healthcare needs. There are peer-reviewed studies on usability and user interface design, and some of these folks must never have seen the articles. HIMSS did a piece on EMR Usability a couple of years ago and I know the systems that have design elements that hopscotch all over the place or color schemes that induce vertigo are designed by people who haven’t seen it.
• Vendors should spend the money to hire medical proofreaders to look at their products. Nothing screams “we rushed this to market” like misspelling medical words. I saw this more than once at HIMSS in the nether reaches of the exhibit hall. Once you lose providers’ trust with something like that, it’s extremely difficult to get it back.
• Allowing existing users to beta-test your product, if they’re willing to donate the time (or if you’re willing to pay for it) can make a huge difference in the quality of releases. This allows for detection of those issues that are particular to the way individual clients use a system. Otherwise, there’s no place like production.
• Vendors need to disclose their defects. More and more are doing this in a meaningful way. On one hand, I understand the call to have the FDA regulate systems. On the other hand, as a physician, I know that the FDA is, in many ways, a joke. Deserving products can’t get to market because of the complexity of the process, manufacturers with deep pockets continue to slipstream their products, and the vitamin/supplement industry got themselves classified in a way so they can say what they want, produce what they want, and generally get away with it.
• Hospitals and practices need to thoroughly test their systems prior to go-live, regardless of what the vendor says or how many clients they have live. Your staff will find shortcuts and features that no one has seen and will rapidly become dependent on these, much to the consternation of your call center, trainers, analysts, and the vendor. The only way to trust the system is to test the living daylights out of it before taking it live.

Unless physicians and their IT teams understand these points, they aren’t ready to leave paper. Those who do understand need to play an active role pushing vendors to improve and vendors need to address core functionality.

If progress isn’t made, the likelihood of a federal mandate increases. We’ve already seen what Meaningful Use has done to the industry. As Scotty once said, “She can’t take much more of this, Captain.”

E-mail Dr. Jayne.