Provider services and solutions

Health information technology: System selection and planning

The challenge

The vision: better patient outcomes, reduced operating costs, improved operations and greater profit margins. The key to realizing that vision: health information technology (HIT). The pitfalls: lack of investment, poor planning and implementation. A poorly planned IT implementation can put patients at risk. Overburdened clinicians and administrators fail to realize the vision.

The Obama administration is putting great stock in HIT’s ability to reform healthcare on a large scale. The president’s stimulus package allocates more than $36 billion for incentive payments to providers who "meaningfully use" electronic health records (EHRs). Physicians and hospitals that adopt on schedule can earn (through Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements) substantial compensation up to nearly $44,000 for each physician and $6 million for an average 500-bed hospital. But late or non-adopters will see reductions in their Medicare reimbursements. This temporary carrot-and-stick approach means that the earlier providers get their EHR systems up and running, the faster those systems will start paying for themselves. The time to begin system selection and planning is now.

How we can help you

• Smart shopping is essential for selecting the HIT approaches and strategies appropriate for your organization’s needs. We can help you formulate HIT approaches and strategies that will give your organization improved clinical benefit with the least financial risk. We can assist with interviewing vendors to help you select a cost-effective HIT solution. We can evaluate your specific HIT gaps and recommend the right vendors and solutions to fill them.
• Your HIT implementation delivers substantial benefits only when thoroughly planned and properly implemented. We can help you align your HIT objectives with your business strategies. We can upgrade your administrative software to conform to your best practice procedures for patient throughput. We can develop timelines and milestones for system implementation, staff training, and system deployment. We can guide you through implementing an EHR and then assess the return on your investment.
• You need to get your EHR system and supporting information technology up and running in time to receive stimulus-package incentive payments. We can design a timeline and benchmarks to shorten the development time necessary to implement a fully functional EHR. We can help you form alliances with payers and other providers to hasten the adoption of an interoperable EHR among alliance participants.

Common services include

• Formulating effective HIT approaches and strategies-particularly, strategic planning and project services around effectively developing IT and deploying EHR and administrative, financial and ERP applications
• Shopping for vendors with the most cost-effective HIT solutions
• Planning HIT systems to ensure it aligns core enterprise applications to achieve the goals of "systemness", clinical excellence, and operation efficiency
• Guiding the implementation of electronic health records and other HIT systems