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Addressing workflow changes has been heralded as vital to electronic health record (EHR) success. Undoubtedly, workflows will change with an EHR and should be anticipated, planned for, and carefully implemented.
When David Blumenthal, the National Coordinator for Health IT from 2009 to 2010, spoke to attendees at the Medical Informatics Association's annual symposium on November 2009, he made an important point regarding the incentives for making meaningful use of EHRs: "It's not the technology that's important, but its effect." He went on to say, "'Meaningful use' is not a technology project, but a change management project." Blumenthal also cited as important components of meaningful use "sociology, psychology, behavior change, and the mobilization of levers to change complex systems and improve their performance."
Given the transformative change that will result from implementing an EHR system and ensuring meaningful use of the system, hospitals and health systems should also understand the sociological, psychological, and behavioral changes that will result from EHR implementation- and redesign work flows in anticipation of these changes.
Documenting Work Flows Is Key to EHR Success
Documenting workflow is helpful in understanding and improving how people perform work. Consider, for example, sequences of tasks associated with processing lab results in a paper-based environment as compared with an EHR-based environment. By understanding how the action steps required to process lab results using an EHR will differ from those used for paper-based processes, organizations can develop new, standardized workflows for...