KLAS Outlines Health IT Vendor Offerings for Clinician EHR Efficiency

A new KLAS report based on interviews with 67 healthcare organizations validates offerings vendors and firms provide to enhance clinician EHR efficiency.

EHR efficiency is one of the most impactful factors to the clinician EHR experience, according to KLAS Arch Collaborative research. However, only 46 percent of respondents agree their EHR enables efficiency. Previous KLAS research has also found that lack of EHR efficiency is the Net EHR Experience Score (NEES) metric most correlated with clinician burnout.

The new report outlines six major service offerings to improve EHR efficiency:

1. Clinical transformation strategy: Aiding in clinician efficiency strategy/program development, informatics program development, delivery-model changes, and/or project management for clinician efficiency projects.
2. Technical build assistance: Building, modifying, or customizing EHR systems or third-party applications.
3. Virtual scribes: Providing virtual scribing services to streamline clinical documentation.  
4. Workflow assessment and refinement services: Providing staff and/or project management for personalization initiatives, assessing and refining processes or message/task configuration, and creating documentation improvements leveraging efficiency data analysis.
5. Vendor selection: Helping with EHR selection, assessing EHR modules versus best-of-breed solutions, and assessing add-ons aimed at driving clinician efficiency.
6. Interoperability optimization: Making patient data from external sources more usable for clinicians.

The report also notes three kinds of software solutions that can help boost EHR efficiency:

1. Documentation burden reduction: Aggregating, visualizing, and giving context and relevancy to EHR chart-review data; also, offering ambient voice and speech recognition, facilitating ongoing interactions and training for documentation improvement, and/or helping organize or create a relevant, contextual problem list.
2. Message/task management (inbox): Assessing the flow of messages/tasks to identify inefficiencies in the healthcare organization’s workflow and/or assessing message configuration to identify more efficient rules.
3. Team communication and coordination: Streamlining communication with members of the patient care team, automating task assignments and communication around task completion, and/or automatically sending and escalating critical lab results, imaging results, etc.

The report outlines offerings from EHR vendors, including athenahealth, Epic, MEDITECH, and NextGen Healthcare.