Ambulatory IT Priorities

The BIDMC Clinical IT Governance Committee was chartered to prioritize project requests and ensure our clinical applications work together as a managed portfolio.

Today we met to discuss ambulatory/outpatient priorities for FY12.

Here's the presentation and the list of ambulatory priorities.

Our top priorities include those workflow enhancements that are necessary to support all the stages of Meaningful Use and emerging healthcare reform requirements.

Key items include many "close the loop initiatives" such as enhancing electronic bidirectional referral communications between primary care givers and specialists.

Also we want to ensure that every diagnostic result - radiology, lab, and pathology/cytology is "signed off" by the ordering clinicians and followup is arranged for any abnormal findings.

Health Information Exchange is always a priority for BIDMC and we continue to be the pilot site for many community efforts which support care coordination, population health and public health.

We're been a leader in e-prescribing and medication management workflow.   Electronic pharmacy initiated renewals (rather than calling your physician) for all our patients will be complete in FY12.

We'll continue to implement novel decision support tools so that clinicians are given the right actionable information at the point of care.

We know that population/panel management tools are important to support accountable care organizations and we'll use tools outside of ambulatory systems to produce the necessary reports but make them available inside our ambulatory systems.

Governance is key to demand management and per my recent Thanksgiving post, our governance committees try to complete 80% of the requests we receive.   This is not triage, it is stratification.   Per the presentation at today's Clinical IT Governance meeting, we'll definitely do our high priorities this year, but lower priorities may or may not be completed based on the unplanned work that arrives, especially "must do" compliance requirements.