Featured Success Story
May 2010
How can technology help medical practices?
The Plot: Electronic Health Records (EHR) represent one of the most dramatic shifts in how physicians deliver health care services. With patient pressure, government stimulus and reimbursement incentives driving adoption, more than half of the US’ primary care physicians, who do not already use an EHR system, expect to adopt one in the next two years. A key question is ‘How?’ How can technology providers drive efficient adoptions of EHR? How can a medical practice maximize the value of this technology to its business and its patients?
The Issue: Our technology client wanted to enable its channel partners to take advantage of the growth opportunity in the EHR market while deploying solutions based on its technology. The company’s key question was “How do we enable the IT channel to succeed in delivering EHR solutions?” This in part, required a clear understanding of the ambulatory workflow (outpatient care), how the workflow was impacted by the adoption or non-adoption of EHR; and where the pain points and opportunities existed to add value.
The Research: In-depth one-on-one interviews with a targeted group of purchase decision-makers across the US (n = 36) including a mix of doctors who had and who had not adopted an EHR solution. Discussed were EHR ROI (Return On Investment), workflow impact, deployment process and more. To illustrate the findings, Blue complemented the study with videos of a ‘Day In The Life’ of a practitioner in a medical office with and without an EHR solution. Those were shot at representative medical practices to bring these findings ‘to life’.
The Outcome: Findings were presented at an invitation-only national conference held by the client. Over 200 channel partners attended the presentation which has been replicated in person and in an online format. The study brought to light a broad spectrum of benefits and downsides to EHR adoption, how to help drive adoption of specific solutions, as well as what it takes to maximize both the positive impact to the workflow and generate a high return on investment. Here are the two video assets from this study: