Identifying and Addressing Barriers to Implementing Core Electronic Health Record Use Metrics for Ambulatory Care:...

Area of Science:

• Health Informatics
• Clinical Research
• Healthcare Management

Background:

• Effective electronic health record (EHR) improvements necessitate precise, valid, and cost-effective metrics.
• Current EHR metrics face challenges related to implementation time, effort, and differing definitions between research and vendors.
• Reducing the burden associated with EHR use is a critical goal for healthcare systems.

Purpose of the Study:

• To achieve consensus on barriers and solutions for implementing core EHR use metrics in ambulatory care.
• To identify actionable strategies for overcoming challenges in EHR metric implementation.
• To foster collaboration between health system informatics leaders, EHR vendors, and researchers.

Main Methods:

• Convened three distinct stakeholder groups: health system informatics leaders, EHR vendor representatives, and researchers.
• Conducted a virtual workshop series to facilitate discussion and consensus-building.
• Focused on identifying barriers, solutions, and next steps for core EHR metric implementation.

Main Results:

• Identified key challenges in EHR metric implementation, including stakeholder engagement, standardized definitions, and clinician burden.
• Proposed actionable solutions centered on maintaining broad stakeholder involvement.
• Highlighted the need for standardized measure definitions across EHR vendors and the integration of clinician perspectives.

Conclusions:

• Achieving consensus on standardized EHR metric definitions is crucial for vendor agreement.
• Integrating clinician perspectives and addressing cognitive/EHR burden are vital for successful metric implementation.
• Continued collaboration and building on workshop outputs can overcome barriers to effective EHR use metrics.