I attended a NIATx webcast supporting their Rapid Change initiative recently, and once again was impacted by the desire of agencies to provide more services with fewer resources…and not wait around a year and a half to discover whether an initiative is working…and if it doesn’t work, get rid of it. The webcast told agency success stories resulting in increased delivery of services.
Rapid Change played a part in this. The concept of Rapid Change has been around a while, and elements of getting staff buy-in, setting goals and proving you can meet the goal in a “pilot” effort to improve practices has been proven to work. Throw in a little Lean Thinking and a few business process analysis and management concepts, and you have a recipe for success. I was glad to see somebody implementing these concepts successfully; it proves the effectiveness of sensible business measures.
What seemed lacking in the efforts was effective use of the EMR to make the process more efficient, record the data, and minimize the effort of data entry and measurement of success.
Forms development & flexible reporting are great EMR tools that enable digital recording of the work performed and reporting outcomes of new processes that are instituted for the sake of process improvement and doing more with less.
Why don’t agencies who institute new processes in the interest of improving business practices use these tools to gather data quickly? It seems reasonable that a project could be abandoned in six weeks if the measures aren’t working as long as the data is available for analysis. If it is abandoned and a new form is involved, most software user tools make it easy to dump new forms or remove data elements that have been added.
The answer may lie in manpower. Resistance to change results in staff “noise” and over coming that is a skill in itself. Having instituted many systems that deliver results of increasing services without increasing staff to provide them, I’m sure I can help your agency develop and implement “practices” that become “best”. Connect with me at info@ehrsio.com.
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