Rethinking Outages
It has been a few months since my last blog post on the Servicenow community page. I thought I would share a few thoughts around EHR outage costs in Healthcare. EHR outages have a direct and measurable impact on patient care, provider satisfaction, and your community image. The root cause of the computer system outage could be self-inflected, external security related or possibly a vendor misconfiguration. Accompanying these factors are desperate systems with complex integrations to share healthcare business information back and forth. Best of breed systems, electronic medical record applications, practice management and billing services are just a few of the many key systems that must be functional on daily basis to the run the business of healthcare. Sounds overwhelming to say the least. However, as healthcare professionals we do what we do best, we take care of patients first and sort out the costs of being reactive later. Unfortunately, this behavior becomes the cultural norm inside of many healthcare organizations. While we all agree that the patient comes first, we need to stop and think about positioning our clinicians, ancillary support, and business leaders to understand the composition of defined clinical processes, patient services, and business operations.
Outage Cost
Strategic words such as alignment, positioning, and visibility are just words until you can tie them directly to your healthcare system business goals and outcomes. It is necessary to share with you the associated cost of an EMR system outage which is an estimated $8.13* per minute per provider. This figure is based on an average across different providers using an EMR system for 10 hours each day over 260 work days. The point here is not to focus on study that arrived at this calculation. My focus is on the obvious problem, EMR outages are expensive and absolutely impact the bottom line. The average only includes the provider cost, there would also be costs related to increased manual processes, double entry, patient loyalty, and clinical and non-clinical staff overtime. Here is where strategic words should have meaning again. Healthcare systems should align business goals and outcomes by implementing technology platforms that can inspect, prevent, respond and produce reports to mitigate costly outages and the impact it has on patient care and operating costs.
Strategic Outage Management
At this point we have adjusted our thought process around outages, associated costs, and desired outcomes for our healthcare system. It is likely that you have these best of breed applications and infrastructure silos in your organization. This is normal based on the rapid growth in healthcare systems offering more access and quality care options to patient communities. This is also a key indicator that patient and hospital service offerings are disconnected and naturally drive a reactive response model. Back to my earlier statement of fix it now and pay later. A single system of engagement that captures the building blocks of your core services is first step to providing clinicians, ancillary support, leadership and more importantly your patients visibility into to service offering changes and responses. Servicenow is that system of engagement with applications like service mapping and customer service management that transform the disconnected support offering into a service aware engagement offering. When you make this service transformation you realize that you can prioritize healthcare services, shift resources, align efforts, and keep patients at the front your decisions where they belong.
*outage costs information based on AC group study in 2011
christopherkillion is an SC Manager on the Med/SLED vertical with Servicenow. Before Servicenow, he worked in healthcare systems for the past 12 years as a Director of IT and Infrastructure.
