It’s hardly a mystery that providers get more use out of health IT when they get good support from the vendors who created it. According to one study, however, today’s vendors need to go further with the tech support offerings, including services extending from helpdesk through engineering interventions.
The study, conducted by research firm Black Book, involved interviewing 4,446 nurses and physicians about the quality of clinical tech support services needed to have an impact on patient care. A large majority (85%) of clinicians said that delivery of patient care services is undermined substantially by subpart user tech support, Black Book reports.
Additional interesting data came from the 1,103 respondents who reported having worked in varied facilities using different EHR systems, which gave them perspective on how tech support options impacted clinical care. Of that group, 77% of nurses and 89% of doctors said the hospitals benefited from advanced tech support, which created an excellent EHR end-user experience.
All that being said, hospital financial leaders didn’t seem confident that they could afford to pay for top-tier tech support for health IT tools. According to the survey, 155 of the 180 CFOs and financial executives who responded to the survey felt they faced too many challenges and had too few resources budgeted for 2018 to spend on additional EHR support next year.
On the other hand, the CFOs are going to get pushback from their colleagues in other departments, the survey suggests. According to the study, 49 of 82 CMOs said they were routinely discontented with a range of tech support provided to the nursing and physician employees. Meanwhile, 80% of the 1,319 IT management and CIO respondents reported that they were seeing a steep increase in clinical grievances after EHR implementation, especially among physicians.
And if they have the opportunity, they’re going to demand more from vendors on the tech support front. In fact, 70 of the 82 hospital CMOs surveyed believe that the availability of multi-level tech support from their health records vendors will be a top competitive differentiator distinguishing one inpatient EHR from the others.
So here, we have the makings of some serious financial tensions between hospitals and EHR vendors. On the one hand, CFOs are signaling that they don’t want to pay extra for additional support, even if it has the potential for improving clinical performance. CIOs and CMO’s, for their part, are willing to shortlist vendors that do a better job of supporting key end-users like physician after EHR rollouts.
Will the more aggressive vendors absorb the cost of delivering more comprehensive, clinical-friendly tech support? Or will hospital financial leaders give in to internal pressure and pay for more sophisticated support? It’s too soon to tell who has more muscle here, but my guess is that given the still-crowded EHR market, the vendors will eventually be forced to give in and offer better tech support options as part of their base price. My guess is that hospitals still hold more of the cards.
Providing ongoing support for an EHR and other healthcare IT has become such a challenge, we’ve made it one of the themes at our new Health IT Expo conference. If finding a sustainable way to support your EHR at every tier, then join us in New Orleans to learn and share with other hospital organizations that are going through the same challenges.
