KRA achievements in 2016

The Advocate Informatics teams were able to make progress toward both KRAs. Some individual hospitals made their site targets, but we did not achieve the system targets for either KRA. Incidentally, a focus on medication CPOE between 8 AM and 5 PM also lead to an increase in the overall CPOE performance for the organization.

For transcription, the organization has reduced transcription costs from $6.6M in 2014 to $2.24M now. Advocate has achieved the expected savings from a finance perspective and will focus on other targets in 2017 and beyond.

For CPOE, Advocate will no longer pursue this as a system-wide KRA. The Advocate Informatics teams will still work on standardizing ordering processes, most notably order set retirement and PowerPlan consolidation. The primary goal for the PowerPlan standardization work is to reduce the workflow disruption for the Sherman physician community when they integrate into CareConnection in March 2018.

KRAs for 2017

From a physician perspective, the teams will be focused on:

• ePrescribing: we will set a 25% target or 10% improvement in current ePrescribing rates, whichever number is higher. Twenty-five percent is the federal government's minimum threshold for Stage 3 Meaningful Use.
• Copy-and-paste: We will focus on those users whose average notes' similarity is over 95%. These users would appear to be at highest risk for being accused of fraudulent billing.

Nursing optimization

The Clinical Informatics team is focused on developing a more standard admission process for our nursing teams. The group may also suggest changes in iView, another nursing documentation arena. Clinical Informatics and Nursing are working with Information Technology to determine the scope of the project. Once the scope is finalized, Nursing will set up a system-wide kickoff.

Sherman integration

Unlike prior acquisitions or mergers, Sherman is currently using a Cerner platform. The clinician training will be focused more on the differences between the Sherman and CareConnection instances. The expected transition date is March 2018. There is ongoing analysis of the differences between the two versions. Once the analysis is complete, the training program will be developed. In some cases, Sherman users will lose some functionality when migrating to CareConnection. The education modules will need to address these changes and educate users on how current workflows will need to be changed.

Revenue Cycle

The Revenue Cycle project (also known as "One CareConnection") is also scheduled to be deployed at a single site in March 2018. There are ongoing discussions about how best to integrate this new software into Advocate's existing billing processes.

• Clinical workflow review: scheduled for the end of this month to better understand how nurses and physicians will be affected by One CareConnection.
• The Revenue Cycle team is working to consolidate the existing provider directory so each physician would only have a single record with the National Provider Identifier (NPI). The NPI is required for our teams to bill for hospital-based services.
• Other workflows may require additional investigation (e.g., transition between emergency room and inpatient floor, level of care order, discharge workflows).

Next meeting March 7th, 5-6 PM (Telepresence, Lync and conference call)
Click here for minutes to prior meetings.