And Who Has a Plan To Reduce Health IT Workflow Integration - NEHTA Maybe?

The following report of a US Survey appeared a little while ago.

Clinical Workflow Integration Tops Health IT Priorities

Telemedicine and collaborative tools are also high on health IT professionals' project lists, reports Avaya survey.

By Nicole Lewis, InformationWeek
March 21, 2011
URL: http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229301328

During the next three years, 95% of healthcare IT professionals believe that communication and workflow integration into healthcare information systems will be a very important issue to address as healthcare delivery organizations prepare to meet meaningful use and accountable care requirements.

The findings come from a survey conducted by Avaya, which interviewed 130 healthcare IT professionals in February at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference in Orlando, Fla.

The survey results, which were released March 14, also showed that 74% of respondents listed automated patient follow-up applications, and 64% rated voice, video, and text collaborative tools as important technologies that will impact their work during the next three years.

According to Bruce Wallace, Avaya's healthcare practice leader, the discussions his company has had with its healthcare customers reveal that clinicians want to more efficiently collaborate with each other around the care process as they seek to improve decision support for their patients.

"Healthcare is a service delivered by a team, and increasingly the team cannot easily meet face to face, whether because of the size of a single hospital, or the multisite nature of hospital systems, or the need for care to be provided across large distances," Wallace told InformationWeek in an interview. "The shift towards accountable care organizations, enabled by the meaningful use of the electronic medical records (EMRs), is only going to expand this need."

More at the URL in the text.

What this survey shows is that clinicians have a pretty low tolerance for workflow disruption and workflow support - as well as I am sure ease of use - are vital in successful systems.

It seems to me this sort of issue is at least a substantial part of the issues identified a week or so back by Prof. Jon Patrick here:

http://aushealthit.blogspot.com/2011/03/professor-jon-patrick-refines-and.html

The point is that change is always difficult and the more change you expect and the harder you make it the less likely you are to succeed.

NEHTA and DoHA are very likely to discover these truths too late, unless they radically re-design their workflow hostile PCEHR plans.

David.