Clinical Systems Goals for FY11

Every year, the IS governance committees of BIDMC translate the organization's short term and long term strategy into IS priorities and projects.   Clinical Systems is a particularly challenging area because so many of the workflow innovations require inventing automation that is not commonplace in US hospitals and clinics.

Here's our complete Clinical Systems strategy and staffing for FY11.   We have a very lean team given that we support 6000 clinicians and staff at BIDMC plus over 10,000 affiliated users.

For FY11, major areas of innovation include

*Elimination of the last handwritten orders in the organization, which requires innovative CPOE approaches in the NICU and ED
*Innovative surveillance and analytic approaches to support infection control and anti-microbial management
*Closing the loop between PCPs and specialists to ensure referrals are completed and documented including alerting PCPs if patients do not schedule a specialist appointment
*Ensure all diagnostic test results are delivered to the person who ordered them and signed off, with followup arranged for abnormal results.
*Enhanced Healthcare Information Exchange in support of meaningful use
*Creative approaches to clinical documentation in the acute care setting including templates, macros, wikis, and social networking approaches to collaboration
*Move us closer to a completely electronic inpatient ("paperless charts") workflow by automating paper forms
*Scanning paper from outside organizations so that even non-electronic referrals are added to our electronic documentation
*Enterprise image management that archives all modalities (radiology, cardiology, pulmonology, ob/gyn etc.) in one repository for viewing anywhere, anytime, using a common viewer
*Business Intelligence that turns data into information, knowledge, and wisdom using advanced reporting and analysis tools in MS SQLServer and related technologies.
*Intranet and Extranet enhancements that move us from a reliance on shared files and email to blogs, wikis, tag clouds, and crowdsourcing

For 2011, we'll be adding three programmers, one analyst, an enterprise PMO director, and 2 infrastructure support staff, so resources are coming after the economic doldrums of 2009.  

Our next step is to achieve certification of all inpatient and outpatient built and bought systems, which will complete by the end of the year.   Our Meaningful Use reporting period will be January-March followed by attestation in April.  Our complete replacement of all laboratory information systems goes live in June and we'll be done with all our community EHR rollouts, supporting 1700 clinicians by Summer.

2011 will be a banner year for Clinical Systems.