Integrating Modern Business Process Workflows into Care Settings (PSS-2527)

Health information technology (HIT) has been transformative to how care is delivered, impacting the patient-provider experience, the provider workflow, contextually relevant clinical decision support, encounter documentation, administrative tasks, and quality management. At the center of many of these activities is the Electronic Health Record (EHR), which often comprises one of the largest of the HIT investments and tools used at points of care. What often gets lost, however, is that there are many additional systems that come into play as part of care delivery.

How “flow of control” passes between systems and personnel is not often clear. Moreover, substantial forces are driving innovation in all aspects of medicine and care delivery, stemming from artificial intelligence (AI), burgeoning new research and new best practices, technology innovation, and a massive influx of new information. This introduces many challenges:

• Introducing new practices brought to bear in care settings
• Updating systems with new knowledge and evidence-based care practices
• Effectively and consistently integrating capabilities provided by systems beyond the EHR
• Managing and curtailing unplanned practice variation (e.g., fostering institutional practice standards)

This paper examines an approach to extend current care settings to more effectively accommodate change. Healthcare delivery has a strong process component. Our ability to better bring together humans, systems, and knowledge can amplify the organization’s prior investments while reducing burdens, streamlining efficiencies, and improving care management.

This scope includes:

• Coordination of actions between systems, including hand-offs and human interactions involved in fulfilling clinical workflows
• More effective integration of human processes with IT processes, including human-computer interaction
• Coordination with external healthcare and service providers (e.g., out-of-network, community and social care , etc.)
• Introduce a vision for how technology augmentation can complement existing systems to drive efficiencies and improve visibility in today’s manual processes