Information is not knowledge. - Albert Einstein Bits of information drive health care. A patient’s blood pressure is 140/90. Weight is 175 lbs. Blood glucose level is 190 mg/dL. And so on. An electronic health record (EHR) can gather and organize all this stuff for clinicians. But what does it all mean to patients? Physicians are always looking for ways to make patient education more meaningful to help improve outcomes. They want to translate EHR information into knowledge that will help bring better health. To help bring meaning to EHR data, Galen Healthcare developed eCalcs integrated health calculators using Allscripts Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). It’s one of the apps that we recognized in Phase 1 of our Open App Challenge.   Turning information into knowledge that motivates There are a number of health calculators currently online – like the Framingham Risk [...]

I read a recent report from The Advisory Board, called Three Key Elements for Successful Population Health Management. It focused on information-powered clinical decision-making; primary care-led clinical workforce; and patient engagement and community integration. The Advisory Board briefing suggests that healthcare organizations must prioritize these things to succeed. This is great news for our clients, because our solution strategies at Allscripts align well with these elements: 1. Information-powered clinical decision-making We must integrate systems to talk with one another across the healthcare continuum. It’s essential to deliver actionable insights and clinical decision support at the point of care.  However, it’s critical to have access to information that lies beyond the four walls where the patient happens to be receiving care. We’re applying our clinical analytics assets to community-level data, in addition to just information from a single care setting. Our [...]

Inspiration for innovation is all around. Sometimes you just need to listen to your grandmother. That’s how Adam Odessky from Sense.ly identified a better way to deliver and follow up on after-care instructions for patients. We think he’s on to something. The app is a Phase 1 award recipient of our Open App Challenge. The limitations of after-care instructions on paper Sometimes after we leave the doctor, we get a “to do” list – such as take medicine, do a series of exercises, or watch for symptoms. These after-care instructions are often critical to better health. But it’s not so simple when you have a fluctuating medical condition, like Adam’s grandma.  Her clinicians sent her home with a piece of paper that didn’t address all the changes she experienced. She didn’t have an easy way to check in with her [...]

To meet the needs of an evolving healthcare industry, Allscripts announced a program last fall to migrate clients from Allscripts MyWay™ to Allscripts Professional EHR™.  Change is hard, but clients such as Compass Pediatrics (Odessa, TX) embraced the switch. And they’re reporting great results. Fear of the unknown was the hardest part Compass began the upgrade with some anxiety. “We weren’t sure how big this change would be for our practice,” said Tamara Bavousett, nurse practitioner and owner. “We were concerned because we started the process in winter, which is a very busy time for our practice.” They didn’t have time to slow down to learn a new system. The eight staff members at Compass had an additional challenge to manage, too. The April 1 “go-live” date for the migration landed in the same week as a previously scheduled move [...]

I recently served on a panel of judges for Allscripts Client Awards. Reading about all the outcomes, I was inspired by how our clients use Allscripts solutions in a variety of ways to continually improve health care.  It’s proof that our partnership — along with our Open platform — helps clients to achieve excellence in health care. There were many solid applications, and I’m pleased to share eight great outcomes from our semi-finalists:   Baylor Health Care System (Dallas, TX) Improving patient safety in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), and Better standardization and efficiency with e-Learning Patients at Baylor receive full attention when caregivers order, prepare, administer and monitor medication. But the smallest patients in the NICU with tiny custom dosages require additional diligence. Baylor used Allscripts Sunrise Acute CareTM to create 180 new NICU order items, standardize medications [...]

Most people agree that Electronic Health Records (EHRs) have significantly changed the way physicians conduct exams. But there is some debate as to whether or not that change helps physicians and patients communicate better. Do EHRs live up to their promise of making patient information more accurate and accessible at the point of care? Or do computers (and tablets) create barriers between patients and physicians? To help improve patient-physician relationships, the American Medical Association (AMA) recently researched the effect of electronic devices on communications in the exam room.  It reviewed more than a dozen studies on the topic and revealed plans to encourage EHR adoption in a recent report. Physician actions shape patient perception of EHRs Research indicates that EHRs do not negatively affect patient satisfaction. In fact, one study found that exam room computing helped improve communication about medical [...]

Interactive voice response (IVR) technology is all around us. People are asking “Siri” to update calendars, provide directions and find a good pizza place. But, we’ve just scratched the surface on what IVR can do. VAL9000 takes IVR into patient medical records and is one of the Phase 1 recipients in our Open App Challenge. Doctors can use it to interact verbally with the Electronic Health Record (EHR). Reducing click, swipe, type Instead of entering or retrieving data in the EHR by clicking, swiping or typing, clinicians simply speak to the EHR. For example, a nurse might report that Stanley’s blood pressure today is 120/70. VAL9000 captures the information and automatically knows where to save it in the EHR. A clinician can also retrieve patient information from the system by simply asking questions, “What’s Stanley’s blood pressure today?” This is [...]

United Regional (Wichita Falls, TX) earned distinction as one of the Truven Health Analytics 100 Top Hospitals®, from a field of nearly 3,000 short-term, acute care, non-federal hospitals. Performance in various clinical, financial and patient satisfaction measures helped United Regional win this recognition.  Leadership across these 10 categories reflects a commitment to developing and maintaining a hospital-wide culture of excellence and the motivation to adopt new technologies and techniques that improve the efficiency and effectiveness of patient care. United Regional also received an Everest Award. Only 17 hospitals in the country received this honor, which recognizes both greatest five-year improvement and top one-year performance. We recently talked with Dwayne McKee, Director of Clinical Intelligence and Business Intelligence at United Regional, to get his thoughts on how technology supported patient care quality initiatives that contributed to his organization achieving these honors. [...]

St. Luke’s Physician Group (Bethlehem, PA) should be proud. It recently introduced a new Electronic Health Record (EHR) system to 80 primary care providers, and 78 of them were able to attest to Meaningful Use. Most impressively, they achieved it in less than six months. One of the keys to accomplishing this feat so quickly was rolling out the EHR along with Allscripts WandTM, according to St. Luke’s vice president of physician services, Linda Gately. Wand is an iPad app that enables clinicians to perform many tasks, such as taking vitals, reviewing appointments or checking test results. “When we first saw Wand at ACE [Allscripts Client Experience], we loved it,” said Linda. “We thought it would be great if nurses could use tablets instead of clunky laptops and carts. We actually held our EHR go-live until we could also roll [...]

No substitutions. I dislike it when I see that phrase on a restaurant’s menu. Why can’t patrons change up entrées a bit to suit their palates? Maybe this inflexibility rubs me the wrong way because at Allscripts we are so focused on an Open approach.  We want developers to be able to access data from our electronic health records (EHR) system, pair it with new functionality and create a wide variety of apps that satisfy the cravings of healthcare providers. That’s why we sponsor the Open App Challenge.  It’s a great way to showcase the innovation that emerges when inventors have access to the right ingredients to help improve health care. For example, Mana Health’s new app taps patient records to produce visual decision trees that better enable clinicians to make accurate diagnoses at the point of care. Taking advantage [...]