One on One with Stanford Hospital's Kate Surman

Transitioning healthcare companies from paper to electronic records presents huge consulting opportunities. To dig deeper into a client's perspective, Consulting 's One-on-One sat down with Kate Surman, the administrative director of patient care services at Stanford Hospital and Clinics.

Consulting: Why did you decide to embark on an EMR transformation? What were the initial and long-term goals?

Surman: Stanford Hospital and Clinics (SHC) decided to embark on a transformational review of the current state prior to starting the EMR design and build process. The organization-wide implementation of an EMR created a strong platform for shared investment in the design of workflows across roles, venues and departmental boundaries. Siloed functional groups that had previously relied on their own unique IT systems or handwritten documentation with limited capability to share information real time would now be incorporated into an organization-wide system with the ability to share information real time. SHC embraced this as an opportunity to take a fresh look at existing processes from the patient perspective and implement process redesign instead of simply hard-wiring the current state. The transformational goal was to design the patient, family and staff experience prior to building the clinical information system. The team completed the following:

• Selected five patient journeys
• Mapped the current state (what "is")
• Identified "pain-points" & "workarounds"
• Developed future state (what "can be")
• Researched experiences of other hospitals
• Considered IT, and non-IT improvements
• Validated IT improvements with EMR vendor
• Educated SHC & EMR teams
• Organized clear deliverables for future use

The success of this effort was measured based on the large number of ideas that were implemented in the system build as well as the creation of a framework for continued system and workflow optimization.