Improving Clinical Workflow, Physician Satisfaction with Health IT

On the heels of yesterday’s post about physician and nurse dissatisfaction with health IT, I thought I would provide some balance by showing how technology solution vendors and medical provider organizations are working together to improve clinical workflow and clinician satisfaction with EMR (electronic medical record) and HIS (hospital information system) technologies.

Earlier this month while attending and speaking at the GE Centricity Live conference in Denver, I ran into an old friend, Dr. Rasu Shrestha. Dr. Shrestha is a radiologist who currently serves as Vice President for Medical Information Technology at UPMC in Pittsburgh. He and I first met up in September of 2012 when I was asked to provide a keynote address at UPMC’s annual Technology Summit. Since then, I’ve continued to follow the progress and good work going on at UPMC. During catch-up conversations over drinks at the GE event in Denver, Dr. Shrestha brought me up to date on some recent collaborations between UPMC, Microsoft, Intel and our GE Healthcare joint venture partner, Caradigm.

I’ve posted a new video about the project below that was recently released by our colleagues at Intel. In that video you will see how partners have come together to help solve some of the thorny Health IT issues that continue to frustrate clinicians. See how UPMC is incorporating the versatility and mobility of Microsoft Surface Pro tablet computers with a solution from Caradigm that helps bring contextual awareness between electronic record systems and other clinical systems in a large, and very complex health organization, like UPMC.

I mentioned in yesterday’s post that it just isn’t good enough for clinicians to proclaim that Health IT is broken and doesn’t work for them. Instead of giving up, we clinicians need to be a part of the solution. We understand better than anyone else what we need from IT to be effective and productive in our work. We alone understand the bond of the physician-patient (or nurse-patient) relationship during a clinical encounter. If you want better technology, let your voice be heard. That is certainly what is going on at UPMC, and there is good evidence it is making a difference. Enjoy the video.

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