Mike Deegan, Business Development Director
Migrating EHRs? Make Sure Your Providers Are Not Left Out in the Cold
The digital transformation of healthcare is essential to improving patient care, reducing costs, and streamlining clinical workflows. Love it or hate it, at the center of it all is your health system’s electronic health record (EHR).
While health systems are adapting their leadership teams to include chief digital officers and expanding the role of the CIO to be more inclusive of the digital ecosystem, without extensive provider buy-in, any digital project—including multi-million dollar EHR migrations or consolidation initiatives—is dead on arrival.
In theory, most health system leaders understand that the provider experience needs to be at the center of any EHR migration project. But in practice, it’s a different story.
Read on to learn how Xealth offers actionable ways to make this a reality across numerous use cases.
Mind the Gap: Challenges During an EHR Migration
From an operational standpoint, EHR migrations can be disruptive across your enterprise. However, beyond the day-to-day challenges of using a new system, such a significant change can also lead to a loss of autonomy and flexibility in how your providers deliver care.
Further, EHRs were not designed to support digital medicine and a robust digital health ecosystem, so clinical workflows have to fill that gap by enabling providers to access the tools they need directly from the EHR.
Ensuring your providers can order and deliver—plus monitor—best-of-breed digital tools that improve health outcomes during an EHR migration or upgrade is essential to securing their buy-in.
Actionable Digital Strategies to Overcome the EHR Migration Challenges
Here are three actionable digital strategies large health systems can adopt to help ensure provider buy-in during an EHR transition.
- Proactively engage patients like consumers. The onus can’t be on the provider alone to engage patients. Using automation and contextual engagement to reach patients when they are most likely to engage and take action empowers patients and improves the care journey.
- Launch or lead with those specialties that will have the greatest impact and ROI. When providers see immediate results, long-term buy-in for digital health becomes that much easier. Examples include chronic disease care, maternity, PT/OT, and behavioral health.
- Implement a digital health platform that makes plug-and-play a reality. When providers see that new solutions can quickly be integrated into the clinical workflow and get to patients with no additional effort, you’ve already met them halfway to overcome their objections.
Let’s imagine a scenario where a health system has acquired a regional hospital network and must implement the system’s enterprise EHR at three smaller facilities. Unfortunately, the providers at the regional hospitals are resistant to the change. They feel that the new EHR is cumbersome and believe it will take longer to complete tasks than it did with their current system.
To address the issue head-on, the health system leverages its partnership with Xealth, which makes it easy for providers to access digital health tools directly from the EHR. As part of the EHR roll-out, providers are trained on how to order and monitor digital health tools they had previously been ordering from a third-party application without additional effort, leading to improved clinician satisfaction. Providers begin to see the value of the new EHR system and are more willing to use it, leading to increased adoption and better patient care.
Leverage a Digital Health Platform to Minimize Disruption
While your organization’s intentions may be good, without an actionable way to minimize clinical workflow disruption during an EHR transition, you may unknowingly impact the provider experience for the worse.
Xealth offers an innovative patient engagement platform that gives clinicians the flexibility and autonomy to provide personalized care leveraging digital health tools with the least disruption. By supporting your organization through an EHR migration and/or consolidation, Xealth can minimize disruption and save clinicians time.
Find out how Xealth can help you improve the provider experience today.