Dr. Brita Hansen Tackles the Clinical Process Crisis
Healthcare organizations have begun looking to health IT software solutions to address the need for process improvement and the ability to standardize care delivery with near-real-time actionable insights to tackle the clinical process crisis. This is due to the rapidly increasing growth rate of medical knowledge being captured and stored in the electronic health record. In a recent post for HIE Answers, Dr. Brita Hansen, Chief Medical Officer of LogicStream Health, communicates the need to find alternative strategies to present day tactics.
“Given the limited resources of most hospitals and health systems and the growth rate of medical knowledge, traditional methodologies for process improvement and control are neither sustainable nor scalable.” Many healthcare organizations are seeking automated methods to ensure process standardization and effective change management initiatives, once implemented, are adopted and sustained for the long-term. In the current environment, many health systems find they focus on a given hospital-acquired infection or other clinical initiative for a short-term and see improvement they desire, only to look back six or nine months later and realize they are back to where they began, requiring them to return to the same process improvement effort.
Hansen speaks to the negative effects of improper knowledge management of best practice alerts in place at many health organizations today, “An excess of non-standard content can decrease alert sensitivity and specificity, causing alert fatigue, which in turn, causes clinicians to lose trust in the alerts, representing a serious risk to patient safety.” Layers of non-standard content built into healthcare organization’s EHR systems increases the difficulty of driving changes in clinician behavior. New platforms also allow organizations to track process adherence by clinicians and in turn can provide best practices and interventions to clinicians to curb improper protocol compliance. Overall, Hansen speaks to the importance of leveraging clinical process control and implementation now to support the future organization, “Provider organizations can correct the issues inhibiting quality improvement today and position themselves to streamline the implementation of new medical knowledge in the future—reducing the time from discovery to practice where it can influence care quality and outcomes.”