Digitalising internal and external hospital processes for better healthcare delivery

“Most hospitals tend to make the mistake of selecting infeasible EHR options despite knowing their constraints. Sometimes, seeking a third party’s advice who is in a neutral position would be useful,” said Heungro Lee, Partner, VAIIM Consulting Group. The Electronic Health Record (EHR) is defined as a longitudinal electronic record of patient health information generated by one or more encounters in any care delivery setting, according to the HIMSS Health Information and Technology Resource Library. Included in this information are patient demographics, progress notes, problems, medications, vital signs, past medical history, immunisations, laboratory data and radiology reports.

The EHR automates and streamlines the clinician’s workflow and its adoption can be a means in which hospitals and healthcare organisations tap on to improve healthcare delivery by capturing structured healthcare information. However, different hospitals or healthcare organisations can have very varied budgets and approaches to EHR adoption or even improvement. Mr Heungro Lee, who is in charge of healthcare strategy as a partner at VAIIM Consulting Group, highlighted some key considerations for healthcare organisations and hospitals in their approaches to EHR adoption:

“Decision making is always difficult. But with a well-designed decision making process, the journey might be easier. The first step for EHR adoption for these organisations is to define what their constraints are, be it availability of budget, timelines to meet or the internal manpower resources required.

The next step is to prioritise the goals to achieve and these could be process standardisation, improving patient care and monitoring and managing hospital’s performance, etc. The final step is to source out feasible options based on the previous two steps. From my experience, most hospitals tend to make the mistake of selecting infeasible options despite knowing their constraints. Sometimes, seeking a third party’s advice who is in a neutral position would be useful.”