6/2023

SST and our collaborators have published “Methods and Lessons Learned from a Current State Workflow Assessment following Transition to a New Electronic Health Record System” in the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA)’s peer-reviewed journal Perspectives in Health Information Management.

The paper documents our collaboration with our industry, government, and academic partners to prepare for the transition of a very large nationwide healthcare organization to a new electronic health record (EHR) system. We provided Human Factors and Business Process Modeling/Reengineering support as part of a multidisciplinary team comprising clinical informaticists, human factors engineers, business process analysts, process architects, requirements analysts, and business process re-engineers. Together we assessed the current state of clinical and administrative functions and the support the current EHR provides for these functions. We elicited, documented. and qualitatively analyzed workflows, workarounds, and process issues such as user interface issues and training gaps, at one of the organization’s representative healthcare facilities. Techniques employed included semi-structured interviews, contextual inquiry in remote data collection sessions with screen sharing of the user interface, Business Process Modeling and Notation (BPMN), and thematic analysis and visualization via Natural Language Processing (NLP).

The article systematically documents our novel “Current State Workflow Assessment (CSWFA) method and illustrates how it integrates multiple techniques to evaluate and analyze work processes. The CSWFA method can also be employed in other facilities and other domains to support process improvement initiatives and optimize implementation of information systems in terms of user experience, productivity, and safety.

Watson, Claire Hayes; Masalonis, Anthony (SST); Arnold, Tim; Chumbler, Neale R.; Plew. William (2023). Methods and Lessons Learned from a Current State Workflow Assessment following Transition to a New Electronic Health Record System. Perspectives in Health Information Management, 20 (2). Available www.perspectives.ahima.org/page/methods-and-lessons-learned-from-a-current-state-workflow-assessment-following-transition-to-a-new-electronic-health-record-system