CUMC has taken another major step toward improving the patient experience here with an agreement to establish an outpatient, office-based Electronic Health Record (EHR).
The EHR will allow clinical staff throughout CUMC and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital to access outpatient data by computer and will streamline patient care, billing, scheduling and laboratory information.
      “The EHR is the future,” says Richard U. Levine, M.D., president of the Faculty Practice Organization (FPO) and clinical professor of obstetrics & gynecology. “The benefits are improved documentation and communication among the 1,200 physician members of the FPO and with our patients.”
      The EHR will be used not only by Columbia physicians, but it also will be made available to outside referring physicians to access their patients’ records while their patients are undergoing care here. CUMC’s outpatient electronic health record will interface with the inpatient EHR being developed by NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.
      CUMC’s new office electronic health record system will offer a number of advantages for both doctor and patient, especially when it comes to improvements in the quality of care. “The new system will provide easy access to patients’ records from any location,” Dr. Levine says. “Patients who see different specialists will also benefit from having all their medical information centralized.”
      The new system will improve the ability of the FPO and Columbia administration to comply with billing requirements since the review process for EHR billing is much easier. Eliminating space devoted to chart storage frees the space for other clinical uses.
      To ensure that the new system meets Columbia physicians’ needs, CUMC enlisted a panel of 20 physicians, each representing a different clinical specialty, to evaluate six leading EHR systems. After a three-month review, the six vendors set up their systems for a final try-out by the reviewing physicians.
      “Allscripts, a company that provides clinical software for physicians, was preferred because its system took the fewest point-and-clicks to get through a patient encounter, allowing doctors to spend most of their time interacting with their patients and relatively less time navigating the system,” says Mike Duncan, the executive director of the FPO. “It also allows a smooth interface of data that doesn’t all reside in one place, such as lab test results and radiology images. We needed a system that was very facile at putting interfaces together quickly and making these other systems work seamlessly with the EHR.”
      After a six-month planning and preparation process that will include everything from computer skills training for physicians and staff to new wiring in offices, two departments will be chosen in 2008 to serve as “alpha” and “beta” test sites. They will be the first to go live with the new system.
      “Then we will get on a schedule and start rolling out the new system across the enterprise, one department at a time,” Mr. Duncan says. “Our goal is to do that within about two years. By the middle of 2011, we expect the vast majority of physicians in the FPO network to have access to an outpatient EHR system.”