Building capacity for EMR adoption and data utilization among Safety-Net organizations

Organizations, particularly Federally Qualified Health Centers or other Safety Net providers, are often under strict time constraints to implement EMR systems due to funding requirements. As a result, these efforts are often viewed as "IT projects" and less emphasis is placed on ensuring adequate clinic capacity (staff readiness, resources, etc) needed in order to carry out the change management process for successful EMR implementations. Without proper planning, training, and assessing readiness of staff, organizations miss the opportunity to build in efficiencies that can lay the foundation for EMR adoption and, ultimately, compromise capacity building for data utilization.

Laying the foundation for systems data capability needs to happen at all staff levels within an organization. This means that staff entering information on one end of a system has to have an understanding of how their piece fits into the larger puzzle of building a data repository for overall population health improvement at the other end, which ultimately affects workflow patterns and even job roles or functions. Thorough readiness assessments should be used early on in order to identify and minimize barriers to EMR implementation as well as to data collection and evaluation.

Following the New Orleans-based Partnership for Access to Healthcare's (PATH) Health Information Systems model (PHIS), where local FQHCs have been brought onto EMR systems, this session will discuss challenges with collecting data and information throughout the EMR implementation process that will help organizations advance EMR adoption and data utilization. The speaker in this session will also present lessons learned through process evaluation implementation findings as well as the steps taken to achieve an over-arching goal of building data utilization capacity through EMR implementations for population health improvement.