New models of care depend on adopting strategies for transforming clinical practice to improve quality, reduce costs, and meet the needs of patients and families. With actionable insights into their processes, clinicians are empowered to suggest and help implement effective changes like standardizing clinical content to deliver highly reliable health care. Monitoring and measuring how clinical processes are adopted and their impact on outcomes are essential to high-impact care redesign.

At #HIMSS18, clinical leaders came together to discuss the strategies they've implemented, or are implementing, to drive appropriate utilization, higher levels of clinician satisfaction, and improve patient safety and quality. Click the button below to download the dialogue.

Participants in the discussion included:

• Jonathan Kaufman, D.O., Chief Medical Information Officer at Bayhealth Medical Center in Dover, Delaware
• Stephen Morgan, M.D., Senior Vice President and Chief Medical Information Officer at Carilion Clinic in Roanoke, Virginia
• Kimberly Stults, R.N., Director, Information Technology at The Bellevue (Ohio) Hospital
• Lynn Witherspoon, M.D., Chief Medical Information Officer at Ochsner Health System, New Orleans, Louisiana
• Dr. Brita Hansen, Chief Medical Officer, LogicStream Health, Minneapolis, Minnesota

We've pulled out a few of the highlights from just one question included inthe final piece and included them below. Give them a read then click the button to access the conversation in its entirety.

MODERATOR: In looking at standardization of your clinical processes and your EHR workflow, how are they working? How often do you look at variations in care and measure your adherence to standardized practices within the EHR workflow?

KAUFMANN: We’re starting to take a look at this. When we talk about standardization, weighing clinician input is a balancing act. We receive feedback from clinicians who’ve been practicing for 30 years, and we must balance that with the latest clinical guidelines. There are certain service lines that are very much oriented to this. Our orthopedics department, for example, is doing a great job at driving down variations in care for our joint replace-ment patients.

WITHERSPOON: The key to all this is being able to measure stuff and to do that, you need data. Over the last decade, as we’ve moved to platforms that enable us to capture data using note-taking tools, flow sheets and things of that nature, our ability to describe the nuance of what’s happening at the point of care has been compromised pretty substantially. As we look at that, as well as why clinical decision support doesn’t work so well, maybe it’s because we don’t have the right data elements captured.

MORGAN: I suspect we’re all, in some way, going through the process of achieving standardization. There are so many foundational components
that we’re not doing well. We’re not capturing data in the same way in every unit, for example. We’ve tried to be flexible with our EHRs, and EHRs can be a little too flexible.

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