Top 10 Innovations: #3 | April 23rd, 2009 | Author: admin

Note: This is the seventh post for my Top 10 List of the medical equipment innovations with the greatest impact on facility design. My criteria was simple: Did the innovation create a significant change in the cost (Increase or Decrease) to design and construct the facility? The greater the overall impact, the higher the item appears on the list . I’ve limited my review to the 20 year period from 1990 – 2009. Please let me know your thoughts. What equipment innovations would you have added to the list?

#3 Electronic Medical Record / Electronic Health Recordﾠ

EMR/EHR is still a work in progress, with many more improvements needed, but by reducing paper processing, physical storage and redundancy, an EHR/EMR system can greatly reduce the overall costs associated with creating, maintaining and retrieving patient records.

The wiring of each bedside and treatment space drives up the infrastructure costs for both design and construction. Implementations rely on a computer at each location, or a portable tablet or laptop computer that is carried by the caregiver. Regardless of the method, these hardware and software costs are also an incremental increase in cost. These up-front costs are supposed to be offset by the operational savings realized by greater efficiency.

In addition, there are initial transition costs associated with the switch from manual to electronic. These include scanning/data entry of active records. (Taking the paper records still in use an converting them to electronic format.) A major impact is staff training. The change from a quick pen stroke or scribbled note on a paper form becomes a typed entry into a computer screen. The user interface becomes critically important to how quickly and accurately the patient information is entered. How good are your doctors typing skills?

The up-front costs for infrastructure, hardware, software, training and transition all represent a significant initial cost. These costs are off-set over time by reduced storage costs (Physical space requirements) and retrieval costs (Accessing via the computer rather than file room.)

The payback period may take a while, but the overall increase in efficiency will pay dividends in better accuracy, reduced delays and will pave the way for greater communication between patients and care delivery teams. The impact to both physical infrastructure, initial investment and potential for improving the delivery of care places the electronic health record at #3 on my list of the Top 10 innovations.

Tags: Charting, EHR, EMR, Medical Record

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