Health IT vendor eClinicalWorks will have a substantial presence at the HIMSS22 Global Conference and Exhibition next month, and it will be focusing on a variety of topics and technologies.

The big focus will be on the vendor's PRISMA tool for healthcare information search via EHR. Executives also will be discussing clinical documentation, practice management, patient engagement and population health, all in the cloud.

More technologies to be presented include eClinicalWorks' Scribe speech-based documentation tool and Eva embedded virtual assistant. These lead to a major topic for the vendor – physician burnout.

Healthcare IT News interviewed Sameer Bhat, cofounder and vice president of sales at eClinicalWorks, who goes into detail on these topics and technologies, and looks ahead at what the company believes 2022 holds in store, including robotic process automation (RPA) and price transparency initiatives.

Q. What is one of the new products or updates you will be debuting at the HIMSS22 Global Conference & Exhibition in March, and how do you expect it to help healthcare provider organizations?

A. Looking ahead, eClinicalWorks is focused on expanding its healthcare information search tool, PRISMA, to create a stronger network EHR. So, we're excited to discuss its benefits and impact at HIMSS22.

PRISMA not only gathers patient records from all available sources; it also generates a searchable timeline view of a patient's holistic medical records. This EHR interoperability solution enables fast and accurate decision-making that can be lifesaving, empowering medical professionals across the nation to better know their patients and provide effective clinical care.

eClinicalWorks has devoted resources to enhance PRISMA's capabilities and help providers find actionable information to make better-informed decisions and reduce costs. From small clinics to large hospitals, any provider can leverage PRISMA to get a complete history of each patient, including discharge summaries from hospitals and urgent care centers, previous diagnoses and prescribed medications.

Today's health IT leaders no longer focus on one-to-one connections between healthcare facilities. Rather, they rely on a nationwide network that pulls data from thousands of participating medical facilities to care for the patient holistically, not just focusing on the immediate diagnosis.

A network EHR is the difference between calling one provider to obtain medical records and having the entire medical community on a nationwide "conference call." Access to multiple connections within the healthcare industry and quality healthcare data will create the interoperable EHR network of the future.

As the number of users in eClinicalWorks' PRISMA system increases linearly, the usability and utility of the network increases exponentially. On average, eClinicalWorks exchanges more than 100 million patient records each month through these networks. If that's the scale of connections this tool can make in one month, imagine the interoperability it will bring to the industry in six months, or years to come.

A patient is more than just a collection of records. Each patient is a complex system interacting with different parts of the healthcare industry. Unless these different specialties can easily communicate via tools like PRISMA, patients and providers will stay in the fragmented world of data sharing.

As emphasized in the 21st Century Cures Act, a holistic view of healthcare data is valuable for both patients and providers. Additionally, PRISMA aggregates information from insurance payers and patients' wearable devices to better promote interoperability.

This is key to creating a functioning, value-based healthcare system, and eClinicalWorks' PRISMA is essential to taking a "one patient, one record" approach in healthcare.

Q. What will be the gist of your main message that you will be delivering throughout the conference and exhibition?

A. At HIMSS22, we'll be emphasizing our commitment to efficient, safe and secure healthcare technologies. eClinicalWorks continues to focus on solutions for patient equality, transparency and ease of use around the country.

Over the past two years, digital healthcare has accelerated at an unprecedented rate, so we'll highlight how providers turned to digital options like cloud computing and advanced population health tools to provide holistic patient care anywhere, any time while avoiding physician burnout.

According to Vantage Market Research, the healthcare cloud computing market is expected to reach $70 billion by 2028. Medical facilities today are looking for nimble, scalable, secure, convenient and low-cost tools to align IT infrastructure with business goals.

eClinicalWorks offers a cloud-based, unified solution for a variety of services such as EHR documentation, practice management, patient engagement and population health, with tailored databases and personalized timelines for every provider to meet unique specialty and regional patient needs.

We're also able to support providers in unique ways such as by decreasing cost of ownership, providing data during unplanned events and optimizing their growth model.

At eClinicalWorks, addressing physician burnout remains a high priority, so we'll also focus on discussing three ways to reduce burnout: by eliminating the manual entry of data, reducing clicks to increase efficiency and easing providers' cognitive load.

For this purpose, eClinicalWorks created solutions such as Scribe, a speech-based documentation tool, and Eva, the industry's first embedded virtual assistant. Scribe allows providers to generate accurate and comprehensive progress notes, which enables a better patient experience by easily finalizing documentation through reduced clicks.

Additionally, Eva empowers providers to view patient records, compare progress notes, book appointments and access educational resources – all through simple voice commands that allow them to stay focused on priority tasks without getting distracted. Such tools are revolutionizing healthcare by significantly reducing documentation and improving the overall quality of the healthcare experience for their patients.

Q. Where do you see EHRs and related technologies evolving in 2022? What should healthcare provider CIOs and other health IT leaders keep their eyes on?

A. 2022 will give way to further innovations within healthcare as remote medicine practices, such as digital therapeutics and remote patient monitoring, become more widely adopted. eClinicalWorks has been working on developing and deploying these solutions for effective care even before the pandemic.

For example, our RPM technology enables the monitoring of patients outside clinics, collecting and transmitting vital data back to the EHR, as well as allows providers to comply with the CMS RPM program. Further, our RPM module offers support with billing automation, creating claims efficiently and completing enrollments seamlessly.

More broadly, automation will continue to enhance EHRs to receive and share more information with external tools such as heart monitors, fitness trackers and other wearables. From automating the front office of any medical facility, to remotely monitoring patients for real-time patient health data, automation will empower providers with more patient data to maximize positive patient outcomes and focus on preventative care.

Another important trend in the future of healthcare is robotic process automation. Bots will imitate user behavior to operate much faster, resulting in lower costs, less human error and improvement in patient satisfaction.

McKinsey Digital pointed out that RPA can offer a potential 200% increase in the return on investment. As such, RPA will become more widespread and allow for greater efficiency within hospitals and clinics related to appointment booking, registration, referral management, document routing, statement processing, payment posting and more. eClinicalWorks has partnered with a few customers to implement most of these services.

All of these evolutions tie back to one key theme: transparency. The next step in this area is price transparency. Patients should be empowered to make informed choices on where they receive services and how much it will cost.

According to CMS, starting in July 2022, issuers of health group plans or individual health insurance will begin posting pricing information for covered items and services. With plans to continue promoting price transparency initiatives through 2024, healthcare CIOs and IT leaders must start implementing technologies to help providers and practices comply with these new regulations.

eClinicalWorks is creating technology to help hospitals meet price transparency regulations, and we're excited to see how health IT evolves to make pricing information readily available for patients.

eClinicalWorks is in Booth 1243 at HIMSS22.

Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT
Email the writer: bsiwicki@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.