Value Of Developing, Optimizing EHR Systems For Clinicians

As defined by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), meaningful use is the implementation and adoption of EHR systems to increase the delivery of high-quality care while ensuring patient safety. However, this hasn’t been the experience of many physicians whose EHR systems are viewed as encumbrances in the way of their clinical workflows.

“The issue we found was that the systems that are out there today are not built with the clinical encounter in mind,” says Kyna Fong, who cofounded ElationEMR with her brother Conan. “When physicians are doing their job — caring for a patient — what they need to do very quickly and efficiently (because their visits are so short and they’re always under time pressure) is look at a lot of different, disparate information about patient on the fly, diagnose, and then come up with a treatment plan.”

Having worked for and with their father, a family physician, the two siblings early on recognized a disconnect between what physicians needed to do to practice medicine and care for patients and how EHR and health IT systems were designed.