Facility managers have an intensive load of tasks on their plate right now. With pressure to implement a wide variety of healthcare IT practices from the meaningful use of electronic medical records software to the new coding provisions under ICD-10, specifically smaller facilities with fewer resources and personnel are experiencing an intense burden.
As such, many medical industry experts are recommending that facility managers be more strategic in the initiatives their practice pursues.
For example, according to a recent article published by Fierce Health IT, Intermountain Healthcare – an extensive nonprofit health provider based in Salt Lake City, Utah – has been able to stay ahead of the curve by enthusiastically pursuing projects that will enable measurable, positive patient services.
"There could be 1,000 things that the meaningful use people could say are useful and good and they truly would be good. I don't know of any of the measures that we've approved or talked about approving that wouldn't be good," Stan Huff, Intermountain's chief medical informatics officer, told the news source. "But when I started looking at the list of other things that were competing internally with those, I can see a bunch of things that we're doing internally that would be more important for patient safety than that measure and more important just for communication of information within our organization."
As such, Huff's facility has chosen to enthusiastically go after only those projects that will be of notable use to the the practice rather than ones that might yield large federal incentives but are not as applicable.
Considering such, it would be wise for facility managers deciding how to allocate their resources to partner with a medical technology consulting company. These professionals can provide unbiased advice as to what initiatives would promote the mission of a practice most effectively, and then provide the products and staff training in order to execute the project with as little stress as possible.
Microwize Technology is a leading healthcare IT consultant offering products such as electronic medical records software and medical billing software from top providers like Allscripts and McKesson, including McKesson's Medisoft, Lytec and Practice Choice products.