Hospitalist group directors and administrators may assume that the hospital’s enterprise EHR, which likely cost at least tens of millions of dollars to implement, will fulfill the IT needs of hospitalists. This is a common misconception, which is understood when considering actual hospitalist workflow. When a hospitalist’s workflow is actually mapped out, an EHRs shortcomings become obvious.
Is your group using e-mails to communicate a list of patients for off-service hand-offs? How does your hospitalist group distribute patients in the morning, and is this completed in the most balanced way? How much time do hospitalists spend in the morning trying to re-distribute overnight admissions to balance workloads or regionalize hospitalists, and is this the best use of your hospitalist time? Does your EHR automatically communicate clinical information at the time of admission, discharge, and in between, or are there just boilerplate messages sent to Primary Care Providers stating only that “your patient was admitted.” Do your hand-offs fulfill the joint commission requirement to standardize and optimize patient hand-offs? How do you know when your service is getting slammed, and are there standardized alerts indicating that a backup hospitalist may be needed? Can you easily measure hospitalist program’s value and benchmark your hospitalist group to national metrics? Can you produce standardized reports to help you optimize your staffing and staffing model, such as hospitalist daily work hours, hospitalist daily visit volume, average number of admissions per hour of day, average number of off-service hand-offs, and other hospitalist-specific data? What about staffing during maternity leaves and effectively anticipating this and other future staffing deficiencies? Are members of your group overwhelmed with hospitalist operational and staffing changes which are hard to keep track of, and which are unable to be referenced easily during busy clinical shifts?
These are challenges all hospitalist groups face, but which remain largely untouched by hospital EHRs.
These gaps left by your Hospital EHR is where OnServiceMD takes over. OnServiceMD is Hospitalist Software. When hospitalist groups demo OnServiceMD, the typical reactions are “this is what we’ve been waiting for,” and “it just makes so much sense!” That is because OnServiceMD really is Hospitalist Software. Scheduling, hand-offs, communication, dashboards, service alerts, and patient distribution will transform your hospitalist practice into a highly disciplined service, with standardization, efficiency gains, and a new model for benchmarking your value. Many software products are becoming available which promote themselves as hospitalist-centric. While implementing a cloud-based solution for hand-off templates, to standardize hand-offs, hospitalists need so much more. Don’t implement software which just solves one headache, make all of your hospitalist headaches go away by taking a look at OnServiceMD.