In the past, the mere fact that a hospital had adopted an EMR wasn’t news in and of itself — at least not to a hospital’s current and potential patients. After all, hospitals didn’t let everyone know when they upgraded its network or added backup storage facilities, right?
These days, however, EMR adoption has become a consumer attraction, enough so that hospitals announce their go-live with press releases and public spectacle.
One example comes from Colorado Springs, CO-based Memorial Hospital, which is part of the University of Colorado Health system. Memorial, which launched its EMR this past weekend, spent $30 million on an Epic system.
The launch comes complete with a portal, My Health Connection, allowing patients to access their medical records, request appointments online, communicate with doctors via secure e-mail and receive test results. The portal is also intended to make it easier for doctors throughout the UCHealth system to access patient records.
The Memorial press release announcing this milestone lumps the Epic implementation in with a laundry list of accomplishments aimed at selling consumers on the facility, including the hiring of 30 physicians, Chest Pain Center Accreditation with PCI and Primary Stroke Center Certification.
As this announcement points up, an EMR launch is seen as a consumer marketing win, not just another project completion by the IT department. Of course, that’s the case partly because the launch comes with the release of a portal offering convenient data access and appointment scheduling. But I’d argue that EMRs have grown sexy enough in consumers’ minds that the mere use of one has some cachet by itself.
Now, this marketing strategy can backfire if the EMR launch goes poorly. For example, I’m sure the C-suite execs at Sutter Health were dismayed when the nurses’ union there went public with safety concerns about the Epic EMR implemented across the system.
For the most part, though, I think we’ll see hospitals bragging about their new EMR if it offers any advantage to consumers. EMRs have become a prominent enough part of medical care that implementing one wins the institution some brownie points.
Of course, organizations also need to publicize their EHR to patients in order to get their patients on the patient portal to meet the MU requirements around patient engagement. Probably not the intent here, but another reason they need to post the “Got EHR?” sign in their window.