UPMC’s Alerting System Improves Clinical Efficiencies While Meeting Compliance Mandates

With technology advances, healthcare organizations gain access to improved tools and better information.  While progress offers clear advantages for providers, many still suffer from archaic, interoperable electronic health record (EHR) systems. This is a challenge, given that it’s not uncommon for patients to move across hospitals, outpatient clinics, and post-acute care facilities with many of these points of care operating vastly different EHR systems.  In fact, within a single health system its typical to find disparate EHR systems with siloed data.  And yet, government mandates require healthcare organizations to achieve interoperability and patients increasingly expect their health data to be readily available at each point of care.

Electronic admission, discharge transfer (ADT) notifications enable providers to access messages across the care continuum. This solution is currently in place at UPMC and I learned more about it when I sat down to talk with Kristian Feterik, MD, MBA, and Medical Director of Interoperability at UPMC, a world-renowned healthcare provider and insurer.

UPMC implemented the Secure Exchange Solutions ADT alerting platform to facilitate real-time health event notifications  across their facilities to enhance care coordination.  While not every healthcare organization is the size of UPMC, connecting data across multiple EHRs and care settings is a challenge most healthcare facilities continue to face.

In my interview with Dr. Feterik, we talk about UPMC’s greatest challenges to interoperability and then we dive into ways their ADT alert system is solving for gaps in care as well as successful use cases. Also, Dr. Feterik shares how they’ve streamlined post-acute referrals for their teams by leveraging their alert notification technology.  Then, we dive into the challenges UPMC faces in complying with the CMS mandated notification requirements (CoPs) and what they’ve done to achieve compliance with these regulations. In addition, he offers suggestions to other hospitals and health systems on ways to achieve compliance.

Finally, beyond the government mandated notification requirements, we ask Dr. Feterik what other notification use cases they’re planning at UPMC.  If you want to learn more about the clinical and compliance benefits of an ADT Alert System at UPMC and how they’re working to improve interoperability, you’ll enjoy this video interview below.

Learn more about Secure Exchange Solutions: https://www.secureexsolutions.com/

Learn more about UPMC: https://www.upmc.com/

This article is part of the #HealthIT100in100.

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About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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