New medical technology aids Alaskans: local hospitals and medical centers offer up-to-date technology.

• Author: Stomierowski, Peg
• Position: HEALTH & MEDICINE

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As director of health information management at Providence Alaska Medical Center (PAMC), Mark Jackson's job includes helping to facilitate scanning and indexing of paper documents into the electronic medical record (EMR).

Since physicians tend to be paper-oriented, technological change that affects daily life at the hospital or clinic still can seem clunky and disruptive. But having one foot squarely in two different worlds is a common state of affairs as technological innovations alter how medicine is practiced at Alaska's major hospitals and across the country, whether in the arenas of treatment, prevention or record-keeping.

PATIENT RECORDS

While the technology exists for records to go entirely electronic, Jackson said, organizations face the task of persuading clinical staff of the efficacy of the change--that instead of being more burdensome, overall workflow would be enhanced. Even though equipment purveyors may purport greater value to new systems, such claims don't always hold up. At Providence, a physicians' committee is involved in helping to devise solutions.

The ultimate goal is greater interoperability, or integration in practice, so a practitioner isn't having to repeatedly track compartmentalized information and bring it together for such necessary functions as accessing a hospital patient's health records quickly and comprehensively.

"We continue looking for ways to improve the efficiency that gets us to interoperability," Jackson said. "Ideally, we want as much information as possible to be electronically fed into our EMR and minimize the frequency of manually scanning and indexing paper documents." The opportunity for mistakes is reduced when key data such as lab results are available almost in real-time.

Where there's resistance to adopting EMRs, he said, it's often because new technology is perceived as adding to the clinical workload instead of helping to reduce it, which can sometimes be the case.

"Like online shopping, it's not always intuitive--they may have to go through multiple keystrokes to document what they're wanting to record."

For better or worse, EMRs will play a critical role in health care reform in America, he said. In a competitive environment with high stakes, various EMR systems are being evaluated to improve outcomes in the delivery of patient-centric care, and some are more appropriate to very specific disciplines such as emergency medicine or critical care.

Providence Alaska also is working with the ChartLink organization to help ensure that practitioners across the state can communicate around continuity of care.

One benefit of all these changes, he said, has been a reduction in paper consumption. Providence is "trying to get greener," Jackson said, "expanding the use of our EMR has definitely reduced our dependence on paper for medical reports."

Remote coding is another benefit...