AMIA an association for informatics professionals addressed the shortcomings of clinical data capture and documentation at their 6th Annual Health Policy Meeting in Washington D.C Today, users often experience significant frustrations with data overload, documentation redundancies, and data entry inefficiencies.
Edward H Shortliffe, MD, PhD and AMIA President and CEO emphasized that from personal experience, he can attest that entering patient data and often following non-intuitive series of screens or clicks can be a source of tremendous frustration and inefficiency for busy clinicians.
More than 80 participants including leaders from various Federal government agencies and private sector organizations involved in expanding the use of informatics and health IT attended AMIA’s invitational health policy meeting. The participants presented their vision for achieving the ideal future state of technology enabled data capture and documentation. Participants also worked on AMIA’s proposed guiding principles for clinical data capture and documentation and proposed attributes for high-quality clinical information.
The meeting participants took into consideration multiple new policies, regulations, and initiatives that exist in our current Federal environment that affect data capture and documentation. Some of these recent initiatives include state health information exchanges, regional extension centers, beacon communities, state-based health insurance exchanges, meaningful use incentives implementation, developing standards and certification criteria for EHRs, ONCs Query Health initiative, and FDA’s proposed guidance of mobile medical apps.
AMIA Board Chair-Elect Gil Kuperman, MD PhD and Director for Interoperability Informatics at New York-Presbyterian Hospital noted that it is very important to consider the strengths and weaknesses of current approaches to clinical documentation and data capture from multiple stakeholder perspectives in order to identify knowledge gaps and research priorities.
As a result of this meeting, AMIA plans to compile the information from the meeting and produce a summary report with policy and research recommendations. The next step is to develop a short range action/research plan of two to three years and then disseminate the findings and work products through various channels.
Go to www.amia.org/meetings-and-events/2011-annual-health-policy-invitational-meeting for more information. For questions, email Meryl Bloomrosen at meryl@amia.org.
