How EDIS Solutions Affect Physician Care in the Emergency Department
It is 10:00 p.m. on a Saturday night, and your ten-month-old baby suddenly spikes a fever of 104 degrees Fahrenheit and becomes unresponsive. What’s the first thing that pops into your mind? The nearby urgent care closed their doors an hour ago, and there’s no time to call the local pediatrician’s emergency line. Whether you dial 911 or drive yourself, the destination will be the same place . . . the nearest hospital’s emergency department (ED). This is not a rare scenario in today’s healthcare. In fact, according to a recent CDC study, ED visits in the US are only on the rise. With increasing patient volumes, increasing demand on clinicians, and increasing patient wait times, where are EDs turning to make sure patients continue getting the prompt care they need and deserve? The answer? Technology.
KLAS recently published a study around the performance of ED technology, specifically focusing on emergency department information systems (EDIS). And uniquely, KLAS did this study on EDIS performance strictly through the eyes of the physician.
It was amazing and extremely interesting to measure the gap in performance between the physician’s perspective and the non-physician’s perspective. For one product, this overall performance-score gap was nearly 50 points (on a 100-point scale)! Granted, in a perfect world, everybody would like to be pleased (both doctors and all other healthcare professionals), but the reality is that pleasing everyone is not an easy task for EDIS vendors.
Another interesting fact uncovered by KLAS’ study was that the large majority (65%, to be exact) of physicians interviewed said that their EDIS met their interoperability/integration needs for patient care. Interoperability/integration is one of the largest challenges in modern healthcare, and even still, most physicians said that their needs in this area were being met by their EDIS.
It is fascinating how much technology can affect the delivery of patient care in all areas of healthcare, but especially in the ED, where so many patients are in need of timely and quality care. What an opportunity it was and is to continue measuring how EDIS solutions perform in today’s healthcare environment.
2013 EDIS report