How are your peers tackling the challenge of provider efficiency? That's what Nordic VP of Business Line Development Matt Schaefer set out to understand during the discussion he led at a CHIME focus group earlier this week at HIMSS17. As you might expect, putting technology in place does not mean that providers are automatically more efficient.
What would your providers do if they had more time? The answers Matt heard might surprise you.
Watch this video to learn more about
- The three aspects of a well-rounded physician efficiency program
- A relatively new approach to physician effeciency by parsing Epic’s user access log data, helping you see where providers are spending time in the system
- The possibilities to turn that data into clear, easy-to-use data visualization dashboards
As always, if you have questions or would like to discuss provider effiency in more depth, please give us a call. We'd enjoy the conversation. The transcript is below.
Transcript
Hi, I’m Matt Schaefer, vice president of business lines at Nordic, and I’m here at HIMSS 2017 in Orlando where we just got done with a provider efficiency focus group with a group of CIOs, and I want to tell you a little bit about that.
So what we did was we talked about how groups are tackling the topic of provider efficiency, and what we heard pretty universally is it is a problem. Putting in technology doesn’t necessarily mean the providers are more efficient in the system. And you really have to spend focused time and attention on that.
Our first question to the CIOs in the room was what would you do if you were to save some time for those providers, and what we found across the board was they’re not saying we want to see more patients. What they’re saying is we want to spent more time with the patients we are seeing. We want to do more face-to-face time, and we want to do more valued-added things like focus on specific population, doing population health, looking at your diabetes patients – things like that. And at the end of the day just having some happier, some more engaged providers.
So what we walked through with them was kind of a well-rounded provider efficiency program and starting at an organization-wide level and then moving down through specialties, all the way down into those individual providers, and then within the framework, kind of taking each of three buckets and using those as your levers to improve provider efficiency.
So we talked about using workflows. We talked about using workflows. We talked about using training. We talked about using the system to actually improve those. In order to put that whole project together, what we talked about was the use of your existing lists, talking to your analysts, going and interviewing people.
All of these things sound like things that you could do today, but the thing that’s interesting and new and available in some of the new Epic technology is what they call their provider efficiency profile. So they give us all this data. It’s called user access log data. That allows us to see what providers are spending time on in the systems and to benchmark those against each other.
And we can use that data to really inform which groups that we interview and which areas need improvement within the system. Now it doesn’t tell you exactly what to do to improve them, but that’s where we come in. We can come in and help and take a look at that system and go interview those people and suggest hey there’s this new feature that you might be able to put in to improve it.
Then the other thing that’s really cool about these provider efficiency profiles is you can actually measure over time what that improvement looks like. So we’ve dumped that into a data visualization tool, and you can look at that really easily. Our dream is to have a dashboard for your CMIOs and your clinicians that are on the front lines working with these users so that they’re empowered to measure that progress over time.
So if you’re interested, have a conversation with us. We’d love to get your provider efficiency data so we can deliver you some really interesting insights on your specific organization. So let us know.