But, EHRs are a difficult proposition. An opinion piece from the Health Affairs blog explains why EHRs pose such a difficult strategic challenge, despite being designed to improve strategy.
1. “EHR designers haven’t started with the question of how value can be created for users of the technology.” While technology is advanced enough to deal handily with any needs, business or clinical, those who design EHRs have yet to create an acceptable trade-off between addressing clinician needs and business needs. In large part existing solutions prioritize one of the two functions, rather than finding a workable middle ground.
2. “Care is not a commodity, and different care processes have different information needs.” While EHRs are designed to treat information needs for all types of care equally, this is not the clinical reality. Different types of care require different types of information documentation, storage and recall. Future EHR design must be as attentive to the timing and purpose of the information capture at hand as to the information capture itself.
3. Business and corporate unit strategies are different but treated similarly. While business strategy focuses on tailoring service lines to meet individual patient needs, corporate strategy focuses on capturing all service lines under a corporate brand. The needs of clinicians and the needs of those who organize hospital business, while in pursuit of a similar goal, are not the same. Current EHRs have addressed this challenge by catering to both strategy types with the same sorts of features and functions, which adequately address neither problem.
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