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A new project launched by Penn Medicine last week will take on the monumental task of EHR usability.
Impatient with the current progress of electronic health records (EHRs), one of the nation’s foremost academic medical centers is taking matters into its own hands.
Last week, Penn Medicine—which operates as the health system under the University of Pennsylvania—launched a new initiative aimed at transforming EHRs into “more streamlined, interactive, smarter tools.”
That effort will focus primarily on what David Asch, M.D., the executive director of the Penn Medicine Center for Health Care Innovation, calls “the middle space” between EHRs and clinical productivity.
“It’s about the creation of some middleware that takes the EHR products created by large companies and creates interfaces that are better,” he told FierceHealthcare. “It might ultimately be absorbed by those [EHR] companies, but I don’t think we can wait. I don’t think we should force clinicians to move to the EHR when we can be a part of the solution to help bring the EHR to them.”
Part of Penn Medicine’s effort is a focus on using EHRs not just as an administrative or documentation tool, but also pushing it into the care delivery arena. That involves shaking up the traditional health system approach that says clinicians simply need more education to unlock the unused functionality of EHRs. The notion that clinicians need help becoming the “master of the EHR” often rubs them the wrong way, Asch says.
