Are You Set Up for Epic Success?
This post originally appeared on the RES blog before the company was acquired by Ivanti in July 2017.
If you’ve visited a hospital or doctor’s office recently, it’s hard not to notice the digital shift taking place. The broad transition to electronic health records (EHR) has changed the way healthcare professionals capture and communicate information with their patients. Those scribbled hand-written prescriptions with instructions are a thing of the past. While electronic health records enable patients to move more freely between clinicians and treatment sessions with confidence that their medical history will be readily available to medical professionals, if technology fails, it presents potential for massive disruption in how doctors treat patients at the bed side. It is rare not to hear a doctor or nurse complain about system interface changes or missing or confusing records during conversion processes to new systems.
This heavy reliance on technology and the requirement for clinicians to be able to easily access that technology is critical to the patient and clinician experience. Are you able to implement this new technology and ensure that overall experience is seamless?
Not just another IT Investment
EHR projects aren’t just another IT investment, but rather an entire underpinning in how patients are treated and billed. The promise of an EHR system has been “one patient, one record, one bill” – easily transferred across clinicians and offices. How do you deliver this vision and still assure clinicians that their experience is consistent across the devices they need to perform their medical duties?
The primary goal of EHR systems is to improve the ability to capture and access patient data, both in health care settings and at home. It also provides a mechanism to have better communication with patients. But when a clinician’s ability to access that data quickly is disrupted, the process starts to deteriorate, and patients feel the pain.
The challenge many medical staff tend to run into is having a seamless experience across all access points. Depending on where they log in from, their desktop experience could be drastically different depending on the system, causing them to spend time finding apps and services that should be easy to access. Login times may vary or be too long, requiring them to wait to access needed information. This can result in lost time that should be spent caring for their patients.
As an IT leader in healthcare, you equip your clinicians with the digital resources to care for their patients, making sure that data is secure and also stays compliant based on HIPAA or other regulations globally. You are also very aware how important the overall experience is for medical staff at various access points. There are so many factors involved in the success of an EHR implementation that extend beyond the system itself. The digital workspace where clinicians go to access the information and records plays a major role in the process of treating patients, and are complex for IT to manage.
RES + Epic Enables Clinicians to Focus on Patients, Not Technology
As you assess your digital strategy within healthcare, likely you are considering, planning, leading, deploying, or implementing and EHR initiative. It may be your first. Or it may be a second, taking lessons learned from your first roll out. Many RES customers are turning to Epic as a trusted EHR partner. They recognize that RES extends the value of that [large] investment, resulting in a better experience for cross-functional teams managing the implementation, and helping with adoption across their clinical staff with an improved user experience through the transition. RES complements Epic across several key areas, and results in benefits to IT, clinician and patients. RES allows for hospitals to:
Spend more time on patient care – providing a seamless user experience across devices allows critical staff more time and attention to focus on delivering care to their patients. Context awareness by RES can help adapt the workspace so that when a clinician logs on each time, it’s personalized for who they are, where they are, their device and more. When clinicians can log into their system quickly and easily access Epic and other critical apps, without any delays or frustrations, the patients benefit too.
Protect your patient records, without hindering productivity – with ransomware and other cyber threats on the rise, it’s critical for healthcare providers to protect patient data more than ever before. Patient information on the black market is often more sought after than credit card information. And every healthcare organization is at risk, as we saw most recently with the data breach affecting Olympic athletes. RES helps improve endpoint security through context aware security policies, whitelisting capabilities and more to prevent unauthorized access to patient data stored in Epic and other apps and files. RES provides flexible controls so that clinicians aren’t blocked from doing their jobs, yet are secured from threats. These capabilities also help hospitals meet regulatory requirements.
Simplify the management of clinical digital workspaces – clinicians rely heavily on technology to treat patients, but the management burden falls on IT. By centrally managing clinicians across all physical, virtual and cloud environments, IT can ensure they have undisrupted access to critical apps like Epic, 24/7. IT has full visibility into workspaces and is able to implement the right mix of delivery technologies to help clinicians be effective. With RES, this complexity is manageable for IT, and the result is that Epic is continuously available to clinicians and updated across different delivery platforms.
Get the most out of your Epic implementation
As you plan for your Epic implementation, make sure you also consider the workspace that your clinicians use to access that critical patient information. Simplifying the management of digital workspaces and optimizing accessibility to apps and services the clinicians need to treat patients becomes just as vital to the success of an Epic deployment as the EHR system itself. Don’t take our word for it. We get feedback from our customers all the time:
“We’re always continuing to optimize our clinician’s workspaces so they can better treat patients. While rolling out a new sign-on system with badge readers, we wanted to streamline clinician’s ability to sign on to Epic. RES allows us to leverage user context to dynamically personalize the single sign on interface for each clinician at log on. When they tap in with their badge, RES ensures that they have easy access to permitted single-sign on enabled apps, like Epic, and proper access levels. This is something we could not accomplish with Epic alone. RES to the rescue!”
— John Walchle, Manager, Engineering Services at St. Luke’s Health System
*Following the launch of RES ONE Enterprise on February 21, 2017, RES ONE Service Store is now RES ONE Identity Director and RES ONE Suite is now RES ONE Enterprise.