UCLA Uses ‘Physician Informaticists’ to Win Over Medical Staff

While other hospitals talk about the need for “physician champions” to convince medical staff to adopt technology, a major academic medical center has gone a few steps further, expanding its brand of medical informatics specialists.

For nearly three years, UCLA Health System, an affiliate of UCLA, has offered the services of “UCLA physician informaticists,” a team now numbering 16.

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Dr. Michael Pfeffer

“The traditional definition of a department in academic medicine we are not,” said team leader Dr. Michael Pfeffer, chief medical informatics officer and acting chief information officer at UCLA Health. But the participating physicians work together much like a department, he noted.

The program began in 2011, when UCLA Health started planning the implementation of its electronic health record. The health system sought clinical content coordinators – those who write and edit EHR elements such as order sets and note templates – as well as physician informaticists from among its medical staff.

This latter group goes beyond content development, actively learning and understanding the workflows of doctors, nurses and other clinicians. “What was really critical is that people understood how everybody interacts,” Pfeffer said.

Pfeffer saw how this initial group of informaticists worked together, and realized how helpful they could be to other doctors as well as IT staff, and UCLA physician informaticists was born.

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Members sit on numerous hospital boards, including departmental boards, medical executive staff committees and the health system’s quality committee, Pfeffer said. They also teach a master class designed to help other physicians become more efficient with the EHR.

Internally, the tech-savvy doctors are focused on optimization of the EHR and other information technology, according to Pfeffer, because improving the EHR is an ongoing process.

UCLA Health has finished what Pfeffer called version 1.0 of its CareConnect EHR program, namely the installation of an EHR from Verona, Wisconsin-based Epic Systems, at all four of UCLA’s hospitals and an initial set of about 180 clinics in southern California.

The EHR went online at those sites throughout 2013. Pfeffer said that UCLA was the first major institution to have physicians build EHR content into the system during the actual implementation, rather than beforehand or during a later optimization process, as is typical. Now, work has turned to version 2.0, which entails upgrading to the latest version of Epic, adding additional outpatient clinics and launching several new EHR modules. The second phase includes getting previously installed sites ready to attest to Stage 2 of “meaningful use,” the federal EHR incentive program that began in 2011.

This year, the UCLA Office of Medical Informatics, which branded the informatics group, printed brochures for external distribution, touting the UCLA physician informaticists program to other healthcare organizations lacking such expertise. The initial outreach is to fellow Epic customers.

“Our team has gained extensive experience and we’d like to share that with you by providing problem-solving solutions targeted to your needs,” the brochure said. “Tap into UCLA Physician Informaticists experience and knowledge to ensure the successful implementation and optimization of your Epic EHR.”

Pfeffer reported getting many requests for telephone consultations and a few inquiries about site visits from hospitals planning their own EHR implementations.

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In the future, Pfeffer sees three areas in which informaticists can help the organization: education, research and continuing to refine the EHR.

UCLA is among the first teaching hospitals in the nation to offer informatics training for medical residents, providing mentorship to about 20 junior physicians over the course of a year, Pfeffer said. The UCLA Office of Medical Informatics also is in process of developing curriculum for the medical school.

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from U.S. News - Health http://health.usnews.com/health-news/hospital-of-tomorrow/articles/2014/12/29/ucla-uses-physician-informaticists-to-win-over-medical-staff