REPORT
Benchmarking the EHR Across Quality and Safety
Key insights:
- The 4E's Framework helps evaluate how EHR implementations support patient safety and quality
- Granular benchmarks (e.g. by specialty and provider type) provide actionable insights and can be abstracted for executives to gauge overall performance
- External benchmarking highlighted EHR improvements some health systems thought were optimized
Metrics for Evaluation
The framework offers metrics to assess the relative strengths and weaknesses of an EHR implementation as it pertains to supporting Quality and Safety.
Efficiency
- Adoption of standardized ordering
- Reduce ordering variation
- Burnout from over-alerting
Effectiveness
- Usage for key quality initiatives
- Alert override
Engagement
- Clinician satisfaction
- Participation in EHR monitoring
- EHR design expertise
Sample Case Study
Some organizations might utilize tools to compare interruptive alerting at a health system level, but few do deep dives that compare by specialty.
One organization’s General Medicine/Pediatrics specialty group had almost 300 times more interruptive firings per encounter than the lowest health system had. They reduced their interruptive firing from 29.5 to about 5 firings per encounter in an effort to reduce excessive documentation.
