Team Building and your Electronic Health Record – Guest Article

Hi all,

We have another guest article for you today! Today we are pleased to feature Kevin Andrews, who wrote today’s piece, Team Building and your Electronic Health Record.

Kevin is the Director of IT at Anka Behavioral Health, Inc.  He is currently involved in the company-wide implementation of AnkaCare, a customized EHR specific to Behavioral Health Services (Defran’s Evolv-CS),  across 80 programs in California, Georgia and Delaware.

Team Building and your Electronic Health Record

So you want an EHR do you?

Whether driven by the desire to better serve your clients, the cost savings of a more efficient system or the enticement of Meaningful Use dollars, you are probably finding out right about now that this is a complicated project. There is a lot of homework you will need to do, and if you are the fearless leader of this project you will be wearing a lot of hats. IT, HR, Finance, Clinical – you really cannot do it all by yourself. You are going to need a team.

Team building, maintenance and preservation is critical to getting your EHR off the ground within your timeline and ensuring that it lives up to or exceeds your vision. Here are a few things that you may want to consider when building and managing your team:

1. Management Commitment: Executive Management needs to FULLY buy into the process. Implementing an EHR will necessitate making sweeping changes both operationally and culturally. They need to be able to understand and ultimately champion these changes.
2. Expectations: If you do not have dedicated staff assigned to your EHR development, then you will need to openly set reasonable resource expectations for yourself, your team and your management.
3. Resource Capacity: With any luck you will have some of the best talent each department has to offer, but they will also need the capacity and authorization to make hard decisions and stick to their guns.
4. Resource Scavenging: Remember, if your team is good, then they are also in demand, so you will need to have management create a buffer for you to keep them from being diverted to other activities!
5. Staff Training: Make sure your team has access to sufficient training, support and room for creativity. An EHR is complicated system and your team must have access to both internal and vendor resources. They should also be encouraged to think outside the box on how the system can be used.  There is a lot of opportunity to create information systems that can be highly valuable to your organization!
6. Lateral integration: Now is a great time to break down the natural silos that different facilities and business units create. Your team’s greater understanding of systems outside their own specialty can help to create a more efficient and robust EHR!

Everyone wants to be part of something bigger and feel that they had a hand in the creation of something vital to the growth and prosperity of their company and the consumers it serves. This can help keep your team thriving in the face of the many challenges they will need to overcome in implementing your EHR!

Guest Article – Breaking Down Barriers to Health IT

Hello everyone! Today we are featuring our very first guest article, and I’m looking forward to reading all of your comments!

Today’s piece is written by Janice Stewart, who is the Vice President of Information Technology at Northeast Parent & Child Society, a large child and family services and behavioral health agency in New York State.

Breaking Down Barriers to Health IT

In June 2012, the National Council for Community Behavioral Health Care published a report on HIT Adoption and Readiness for Meaningful Use in Community Behavioral Health. Of their more than 2000 surveyed members, only 21% of respondents are using EHRs with no more than 2% ready to meet Meaningful Use requirements by the end of this year.

The report presents many key findings regarding the barriers behavioral health organizations (BHOs) will have to overcome to implement health IT and achieve Meaningful Use, with 30% of responding organizations identifying “upfront financial cost” as the leading roadblock to implementation. Among the many other barriers, approximately 9% of surveyed agencies cited “workforce issues” as significant – specifically, the lack of dedicated staff to properly select and implement technology, manage the project and maintain the systems.

For many community BHOs, funding constraints relegate the development of an advanced technology program to the status of a luxury, and they manage to get by with a minimum of resources, including an IT workforce.  That “minimum resource” approach will need to change with HIT and EHR adoption, regardless of the size of the organization. BHOs have traditionally utilized technology as information collection systems created to alleviate manual tasks and accumulate data for administrative, financial, and compliance purposes, or because an external regulatory body requires it. However The EHR is not there to simply collect data – first and foremost, the EHR is a tool for the behavioral health worker to undertake clinical practice, with the ultimate goals being interoperability and information exchange to improve quality care coordination. The strategic goals of HIT are based on data derived from the real time activities of end users – clinicians and practitioners – whose primary objective is to facilitate behavioral health care.

Consequently the clinician’s faith in the new tools is critical to strategic success. The National Council’s report finds that 7% of agencies see “provider resistance” as a barrier. Informed technical support will be essential as providers experience a complete shift in conventions of practice, adjusting to changes in how they treat, how they document, and to some extent the very language they use as organizations standardize data elements during EHR implementation. Equally, building and supporting the EHR workflow requires not only technical skills, but strong business analysis capabilities to coordinate the cerebral process model of behavioral health treatment with a logic-based information technology model. It’s meshing the two approaches that creates success in the form of worker acceptance and satisfaction, which are mission critical to successful HIT adoption.

Regardless of the size of the organization or whether the system is hosted in the cloud, the implementation, management and support of HIT and HIE does require dedicated staff with more than just technical skill sets. HIT requires a continuum of true integrators who can:

• support the clinical workforce toward the organizational goal of integrated healthcare
• understand current and emerging technology, security and privacy, and
• respond to clinical advances, regulatory changes and integrated healthcare strategy.

As part of their overall plan, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) has funded the Health IT Workforce Development Program to train a new workforce of Health IT professionals. With a shortage predicted as overall adoption increases, BHOs will be competing for adequate resources.

Organizations such as the National Council are strongly advocating to create awareness, and to affect needed change to the eligibility rules that are hindering Community BHOs from adopting HIT because of major upfront financial barriers. Their June report stimulates awareness of many other hindering factors as well, such as critical workforce and acceptance issues.

As Behavioral Health Organizations prepare for HIT, they must recognize that with its adoption, technology becomes fundamental to practice. Therefore they must adequately plan for and fund the talented internal and/or consultative workforce resources that are a key requirement of success.