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Overview Brochure

Electronic Health Records

Healthcare Industry Influencers of Change In the past 20 years, information technology has revolutionized virtually every facet of our lives. Organizations of all types have long seen that information technology—viewed comprehensively and deployed effectively—can replace old challenges with new possibilities. However, one of the areas of slow evolution is our healthcare system.

In today’s healthcare practices of all types and sizes, information is both a benefit and a challenge for every provider. New information about disease and treatment is saving lives, while a lack of effectively managed data can put this information at risk.

More mobile populations make it difficult to transfer medical records to the point of care. Adding to the complexity, most patients are not cared for by a single physician or one organization, but by a collective process that includes nurses, consulting specialists, diagnostic technicians, and administrative staff. At a time when entire populations in many countries are aging, chronic disease management can increase the burden on healthcare systems.

In addition, paper-based record-keeping systems are adding to the expense of healthcare. Physicians and nurses spend time away from patients attending to a great deal of paperwork. The reliance on paper-based medical records adds an enormous financial burden, with substantial costs for record storage and administrative support staff. Larger practices can see transcription costs alone reach more than US$1 million a year. Delayed or missing paperwork adds time to patient hospital stays and can lead to unnecessary or duplicate clinical tests.

“Efficiency has increased dramatically. We did an in-motion study in our records room, which showed that filing electronically is 80 percent more efficient than filing manually, and we’ve seen proof of that on a daily basis.” – Jamie R. Steck, Director of IT, Central Utah Clinic

Adding to quality-of-care-issues, it is becoming more difficult to disseminate accelerating healthcare knowledge to patients and caregivers. Today, it takes new standard practices 15 years to evolve from discovery to practice. Life sciences companies are also seeking more efficient ways to communicate with the healthcare community.

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Building Connections: Making Electronic Health Records Work Healthcare organizations of all sizes face many of the same demands and challenges when making the transition to electronic health records. To realize the long-term and widespread benefits in this transition requires network connections (Table 1). The true value comes through networked access through a range of devices across the continuum of care.

Table 1. Many of Today’s Healthcare Challenges Solved Through Networking

Healthcare Challenges Networking Benefits Improve quality of care: Healthcare providers are striving to reduce reliance on handwritten records and implement better systems to efficiently document patient interactions, automate communications, track procedures and prescriptions, and provide clinical best practices based on clinical knowledge base systems.

• Improves patient care through greater access to information • Curtails medical errors due to paper-based systems • Reduces test result wait times • Reduces patient wait times with faster, easier workflow • Reduces adverse drug events (ADEs) with electronic prescribing (e-

prescribing)

Enhance productivity and organizational workflow efficiency: Successful healthcare organizations depend on the productivity of caregivers and the efficiency of staff. Too often, skilled caregivers spend most of their time completing paperwork instead of treating patients. Simply maintaining paper-based records can be an enormous challenge, as staff must deal with lost charts, duplicate records, and records that are not available for days or weeks during transcriptions.

• Helps improve efficiency of mobile caregivers and staff • Helps increase speed of diagnosis and treatment • Decreases paperwork for clinicians • Reduces record-keeping time • Improves caregiver productivity and optimizes workflow efficiency

Better information and improved communications at the point of care: Frequently patient records, test results, and other critical data are not available when needed, are often misplaced, and in some cases, are completely lost.

• Reduces the possibility of misplaced and lost records • Helps ensure that patient records, test results, and other critical data

are available when needed and are not misplaced or lost • Helps caregivers obtain better information at the point of care • Enables more flexible access to information for mobile caregivers at

point-of-care • Integrates communications

Reduce costs: Healthcare costs are rising due to inefficiencies of paper-based, manual processes such as expenses for transcription of physicians’ dictated notes; pulling, filing, and maintaining charts; and maintenance of record storage.

• Reduces paperwork and record filing and retrieval • Recover physical storage space with digital records • Reduction in paper and supply costs • Decreased staffing for chart management • Decreased staffing resulting from improvements in workflow • Reduction in transcription costs

Protect privacy of patient records: Regulations for patient record privacy place stringent demands on healthcare providers to protect patient information while implementing electronic methods for sharing with other caregivers and patients.

• Provides resilient security to protect patient record information across the entire wired and wireless environment

• Compliance with privacy regulations

Connected Electronic Health Records Require Medical-Grade Networks Managing a clinical environment today involves a large amount of paper. Clinical information stored in paper charts is difficult to access, takes up costly space dedicated to chart storage, and can impact quality of care. Connected electronic health records provide effective distribution of information to caregivers at the point of care to support higher quality of care with increased efficiency. Caregiver productivity and clinical efficiency can be improved by automating common activities, including prescribing, capturing charges, dictating, ordering labs, viewing results, providing patient education, and taking clinical notes over a network. Clinicians can access patient charts and medical histories without having

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to search files or wait for chart pulls. Connected electronic health records over secure wireless or the Internet provide remote access to medical records from satellite sites, or even from home.

Connected healthcare applications, including electronic health records, that streamline information and communications at the point of care are critical to healthcare organizations under pressure to cut costs, increase productivity, and improve patient care. These applications require a network infrastructure that is medical-grade, or specifically designed for the healthcare industry, to satisfy the requirements of patients and the highly specialized professionals who rely on them.

The Cisco® Medical-Grade Network provides a foundation for healthcare organizations to enable a wide variety of applications. The Cisco Medical-Grade Network provides the underlying architecture designed to meet the specific needs of health care.

• Uses intelligence to triage information, delivering the right information to the right people at the right time.

• Integrates vital equipment and devices into a converged infrastructure, streamlining communications and care.

• Protects with self-defending network security.

• Connects people and information in real time regardless of location or device, creating efficiencies and responsiveness.

Medical-grade networks enable connected electronic health record applications and provide numerous advantages and capabilities.

Mobility and remote access to information: Cisco wired and wireless networks give caregivers greater mobility by delivering critical patient information wherever they need it, over a wide range of computing platforms. Secure IP virtual private networks (VPNs) encrypt data to protect privacy of electronic health records when extended to remote facilities, hospitals, medical offices, and even physician’s homes.

Security and privacy of patient information: The requirement to protect confidential patient information is more critical than ever before. A Cisco Medical-Grade Network provides self-defending security technology that not only guards the physical network, but also addresses privacy requirements. Access control and network-based admission control limits access to authorized users and devices, an essential step in guaranteeing patient privacy. The network also provides intrusion outbreak protection for a wide range of mobile devices including servers, laptops, tablet PCs, and personal digital assistants (PDAs) to address intrusions and outbreaks such as worm and virus attacks—two of the most common security breaches for today’s organizations.

Enhanced communications and collaboration: Medical-grade networks enable improved communications and collaboration through integration of data, voice, and video applications over the converged IP network to deliver cost savings and productivity-enhancing applications such as unified messaging, interactive voice response, and multimedia conferencing. In addition, the network can scale to integrate images, test results, and other critical information with the patient record to speed diagnosis and treatment through easy access to results.

Next Steps The challenge for healthcare in the 21st century is to connect the disparate areas of care, information, and knowledge, and to reengineer the processes that form the patient experience. By implementing a self-defending, medical-grade network, all facets of the healthcare industry can improve productivity, reduce costs, and improve patient care.

For More Information For more information, call your Cisco representative or partner today, or visit Cisco at:

http://www.cisco.com/go/healthcare

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