Deborah Heart and Lung Center's Vice President and CIO, Rich Temple, was recently interviewed by Health Tech Newspaper about his organization’s digital transformation strategy and the projects his team has focused on over the past 12 months. The organization is one of just three hospital systems in the country with the unique approach of not sending bills to patients.
Among Temple’s most significant focal points is leveraging analytics dashboards through MEDITECH’s Business and Clinical Analytics solution to visually see data in a way that informs critical decision-making.
“Much of this type of work is around looking for patterns, working on process improvement based on that, and using quality indicators to track a million different things across the hospital,” Temple explains.
“We also use analytics for tracking bed requests and how long that process takes, and in all of our procedural areas. We do things like tracking first-starts, making sure that if a patient is supposed to be in the operating room at seven in the morning, they’re in at seven in the morning.”
Through MEDITECH’s Business and Clinical Analytics, Temple monitors time studies and analyzes bottlenecks from when a patient arrives to when they leave.
Keeping Patients at the Center
Deborah Heart and Lung Center prioritizes keeping patients at the center of care by offering a personalized and easily accessible patient experience, including through its MEDITECH Expanse patient portal.
“We’ve made a lot of progress in helping patients to access the portal for the first time; in adding functionality for patients to secure message providers; and in improving the pre-registration process, capturing information through a questionnaire that patients can fill in online, so it cuts down on them having to provide that twice,” Temple explains.
“People will make decisions on where they get their care in large part based on what their experience is with interacting with that provider – getting an appointment, getting information, being able to access resources, and so on. We provide an experience where they can do a lot of the heavy lifting from home,” he adds.
Interoperability is a key component of Deborah Heart and Lung Center's patient engagement strategy. The organization is actively collaborating to promote health information exchange across the state and ensure seamless integration of clinical continuity of care documents into its Expanse EHR. Additionally, they aim to receive notifications when a patient seeks care at another location.
“It really will allow any provider, or any person who is involved in the patient’s care, to have a 360-degree view of everything they need to know about the patient; not just what’s happening within the walls of the Deborah Heart and Lung Center,” Temple explains.
Looking Ahead
Finally, Temple outlines Deborah Heart and Lung Center’s future priorities, including enhancing mobile capabilities, staying ahead of cybersecurity measures, and investing in artificial intelligence.
“AI is real,” he states. “Sometimes we get fixated on flavors of the month, or get all excited about something, and then it kind of fizzles. But I don’t think AI is going to fizzle. It’s about doing it in a way that is equitable, that inspires confidence in the output, without threatening people’s jobs.”
Among these efforts is the exploration of integrating artificial intelligence tools into MEDITECH to automate certain processes. For example, this could involve AI listening to dialogue in a patient encounter and generating a clinical note based on it.
“Ultimately down the road, we want to look at tools that we can use to provide even better care to patients within the MEDITECH platform,” he states.
You can read Temple's full interview with Health Tech News and watch his video with MEDITECH, highlighting his approach to leveraging MEDITECH's Business and Clinical Analytics to drive decisions.
