FEATURE
cian down the street or provide the abil- ity to share data with health care facili- ties outside of their system.”
Build Your Own System To attain interoperability, you have to start talking about outcomes from a physician’s standpoint—patient- reported as well as clinical outcomes, says David Fitzgerald, chief executive officer of Proliance Surgeons in Seat- tle, Washington. “ASCs need to start tracking every- thing from their doctors, and usually it is hard,” he says. “Find out if the doctors working in your ASC have already created a patient tracking tool. If not, find your own tool. If they have, get a hold of it and roll it on to your ASC. Why recreate a process that the doctors are already doing for maybe their hospital?”
If you are going to create your own tracking system, you are going to have to develop the metrics and get the data, he says. “Pick a procedure and start tracking. Pick an easy one and one that your doctor is passionate about. Track the outcomes thereon and docu- ment and tie it to what the doctors are doing. Then you own the data and are able to prove that you have the value. There are plenty of vendors who will do patient-reported outcomes.” Figure out what you want to mea- sure and how you prove your value, Fitzgerald says. “To give you an exam- ple, my dad and my brother-in-law had total knee surgery at the same time, and their desires for the outcome of the surgery were completely different. Dad did not want pain, and my brother- in-law wanted complete mobility. So, my dad’s outcome may have been bet- ter than my brother-in-law’s.” You have to build those processes for patient-tracking tools to allow them to get back to the doctor’s office, he says. “You need the right tool and mechanism to get that data back.” You need that interoperability for an EHR, Fitzgerald continues. “Get
If an ASC needs to provide continuity of care across an episode to a physician partner’s EHR, it needs to have a system that speaks to that EHR.”
—Roy Georgia, ICE Technologies
that data flowing in from your imag- ing center, anesthesia, etc., and then use that data to create your database," he says. Your goal is to get that opera- tive note to both your surgeon’s office and your primary care physician (PCP). What you are really after is that the PCP knows the outcome. We have our EHR—AmkaiCharts—inter- face with our surgeons’ database and have theirs go back to the referring physicians. It is all about putting it in front of the patient and having the full record of what they want and, then, getting it back to the surgeon and the PCP. You need a full robust record for your episode but the PCPs need to manage that. ASCs are an episode in the whole process.”
Ultimately, the need for interopera- bility is based on software applications interfacing, which dictates the busi- ness and clinical requirements, Geor- gia says. “As ASCs understand their partners, they need to understand their partners’ software approach and imple- ment a software that supports that data exchange,” he says. “If an ASC needs to provide continuity of care across an episode to a physician partner’s EHR, it needs to have a system that speaks to that EHR. Each vendor will be an expert on their product, but sometimes they won’t talk to each other. If you are going to make an investment in EHR, you need an expert to navigate that and make sure that all your products are interfacing and successfully per- forming interoperability.”
ASC FOCUS SEPTEMBER 2017 |
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