Helping clinicians improve their EHR knowledge
MH: You come to healthcare with an outsider’s perspective. Are there investments you are making to break the mold of what healthcare has traditionally done?
Lee: No. 1 I would say is around Epic. One of our physicians asked, “Are we practicing Epic, or are we practicing medicine?”
We’ve gotten into some detailed analytics around the performance of our physicians and their use of Epic and we’ve been partnering with Epic around how we measure that. It includes things like leveraging data science to derive an Epic score for every physician. The data includes things like Epic use after hours, percentage of orders using defaults; things that indicate how Epic is being used.
We’ve taken that information and have started a program where we’re providing an Epic coach to every single one of our physicians in an ongoing relationship to increase the physician’s Epic score.
We’re really early in the process, but the feedback has been very positive. We’re starting to receive emails thanking our coaches for their tutorial sessions. We’re also partnering with Epic on Lean processes to improve workflows, so the combination of improved proficiency and workflows should help our physicians around driving toward the Triple Aim goals.
MH: Do you share that Epic score, similar to the way you would share clinical quality scores?
Lee: We’re starting to trend the data. My goal is to use the trending, the summary-level information, to understand how we’re performing across different specialties. It’s also to look at our performance across our coaches and help inform them on how to improve the population of doctors that they are responsible for. We’re in our infancy, but I would expect that we’re going to realize some really great results. In fact, I was just reading an article about another health system that had done this and they experienced, I think, a 47% increase in proficiency across their users.
MH: How do you see this interacting with your goals for the Triple Aim?
Lee: The more time we can give back to our users, the more time that they’re going to be able to focus on the patient experience and impact better outcomes that are going to impact the cost of healthcare. On the population health piece … we’ve been working with Epic on improving capabilities around care management, around the risk profiling; taking the information both from payers as well as Epic, and then being able to risk-profile the populations.
MH: Are there specific segments of your patient base that, as you look at analytics more broadly, you want to roll some of your analytical work out to and build a broader population health environment?
Lee: We have a partnership with UnitedHealthcare on a program called Colorado Doctors Plan, which is still a fee-for-service model, that’s taking a look at more proactive management of the member population to reduce the cost of care as well as increase the whole customer experience. It’s a narrow-network product that we partner on.
As a part of that, we’ve taken algorithms—both data we have from United as well as some of the machinelearning practices that we’ve pulled from other healthcare systems—to be able to come up with a risk rating for that population. The investments that we’re doing on machine learning and AI right now are pretty tactical. As a part of our Centura Health 2025 strategy, we’ve got a plan to increase the maturity and size of our market, and one of the things we’re working on is a prioritization process of how we’re, as an IT organization, staying aligned with our business goals and focusing on current-year priorities aligned to that 2025 strategy, and then making sure we’re aligned on what we’re not working on.●