Designing an Electronic Medical Record

Some big ideas come from asking pretty simple questions…

As it turns out the inspiration and vision for the development of an innovative Care Delivery Platform at WellMed was born out of necessity.  A necessity to accurately and efficiently deliver timely information about patients health status to caregivers at the point of care and document in a way that did not inhibit the caregivers ability to deliver quality care to seniors.

Many physicians are burdened with a mass of paperwork detailing patient activity.  The simple idea of putting relevant and timely information in the hands of a physician when it is most important to help manage risk and provide adequate decision support at the point of care is a goal many EMR vendors have tried to achieve by simply aggregating and archiving data.  There are several decision support tools available for physicians that manifest themselves in different ways such as ePrescribing applications, Reference Material, Patient Education Handouts, Risk Adjusted Payment Attestations, Document Management Repositories, Clinical Protocol sheets, etc… some within a single application, many others completely disconnected and disjointed requiring the user to log into multiple applications to perform seemingly simple functions.

When you think about it clinicians and many tertiary healthcare providers live and work in an environment where the vast majority of documents sent and received are in paper form and it is still growing.  When you add electronic information in the form of e-mail, document management systems, and patient data to the mix it becomes inefficient and cumbersome for providers to effectively manage.

We’re two decades into the internet revolution, and despite many efforts to create an all electronic clinic, paper is still the predominant method of healthcare communication in this country.  It’s 2010 and many providers get their documents more or less the same way we did 200 years ago!!!

That’s absurd…

While we can’t change an entire industry we can start by looking at ourselves and how we deliver healthcare to seniors.  When I started with WellMed 2 years ago I was inspired by our CEO’s vision and approach to wanting to leverage technology to gain efficiencies and better manage risk for our patients to keep them healthy and out of the hospital.  At the same time I saw his frustration with current solutions that did not allow us to progress to the next level of patient care.  The truth is we will never completely get rid of paper, this is a common misnomer, but we can manage it more effectively and make it more accessible to clinicians.  What the our clinics needed was a new, complementary approach for managing patient information.

So here is the simple questions that led to the creation of the Care Coordination Platform:

What would it take to deliver quality information to physicians at the point of care?

What would empower physicians to help deliver quality care for seniors and help improve outcomes?

After much thought and effort we think we’ve got an approach that nails these things.  It brings efficiency, new benefits for both business and physicians and more importantly our seniors.  So far the feedback and the demand for a solution have been terrific.

As we get ready to bring the solution we started developing a year ago to physicians we will continue to evolve the platform to include many other data elements in the patients continuum of care.  We have not been sitting idle and have solicited feedback from many providers and will continue to be engaged with all users of this new system.  Initial feedback has been great and we’ve got lots more work ahead, but we are off to a great start.

When we introduce the EMR Preview in 1Q 2011, it will have exceeded our current EMR functionality in many ways and plan on quickly following with quarterly releases of additional functionality including ePrescribing, and document management integration in subsequent iterations.  I’m very proud of what our team has created in such a short amount of time and will continue to develop as we forge new ground and develop new integrations with other custom and vendor solutions.  I would love to show you more than just a teaser image as the user interface takes full advantage of rich internet application (RIA) functionality.   I truly believe what we have designed will empower our providers to delivery quality care to seniors.  Until such time we make our internal development efforts widely available to contracted providers I will instead focus future posts on our approach to architecture, user interface, SOA, and agile development.