How about a view into the competency of the individuals who administered the care? The Electronic Competency Records(ECR) are established and kept current by the institution and/or the individual in the form of an online portfolio. Inside the portfolio can be found all of the competency indicators which paint a picture of the competence of the doctors, nurses, technicians and lab personnel which were involved with a specific patient throughout their care.

Although it is not currently considered a requirement with Joint Commissions to have your ECR system in place, it certainly should be. Not only will this allow for a tighter connection between patient and care giver, it can also help hospitals to continuously evaluate how their staff is doing. If a medical error occurs in the process and is captured in the EHR, it can then be tracked back to the individual who committed the error where it can be determined if they were fully qualified. If connected in real-time, there is the potential that individuals who do not have the necessary competencies, skills and compliance courses in place to conduct a specific procedure, operate a device or a test, the system could keep them from delivering those things in the first place. Now that is an innovative use of technology.

Decision Critical delivers an entire competency suite which includes an electronic portfolio, learning and evaluation tools. Start thinking about being better than you have to be and implement your ECR competency suite today.

Given the place where the healthcare industry has come from (and many institutions still are), attaining a Stage 7 status is a certainly a significant development for the hospital, insurance provider and patient alike. The big problem lies in the age-old data entry adage, “garbage-in, garbage-out”. Along each step of the care giving process there are all kinds of humans typing stuff into computers. That presents two possible problems. Firstly, is the nurse, doctor or other healthcare technician entering the information correctly into the system and secondly, what is the competency level and expertise of that person?

The missing element is a comprehensive set of competency indicators on each healthcare worker in your facility. If each of your staff was to maintain an online portfolio including all components found in a typical a resume or curriculum vitae plus additional items such as CE transcripts, past evaluations and even preceptor-filed checklists, it could be connected to the EMR, offering a full view. This is like the flip-side of the patient related information, adding the care giver’s data to the mix.

Additionally, staff members see the use of the portfolio as a perk as an employee. It becomes the repository for their entire life’s work that is available any time, online and secure.

Now, in an effort to ease the way for healthcare organizations to improve the deployment of EMR systems, the HHS is reducing a lot of the red tape which was required to conduct electronic transactions in the past. A big part of these new rules allows for a uniformity of information and additional acceptable transmission formats. Interoperability is the real carrot here. Making sure that whatever systems the hospitals invest in and deploy, they will be able to communicate instantly with the insurance companies, giving them immediate and accurate information on the determination of insurance coverage.

Could this be another scale tipper in getting our care giving organizations into the domain of the paperless? That remains to be seen, but with the multiple definitive actions taken by the government to move our healthcare system to a workable and connected EMR system, it seems to have a lot more potential than has been seen in a while.

In most other industries the PC has been an essential tool, propped on the desktop of nearly every employee and used for word processing, number crunching and numerous other analytical and research functions. Computer literacy, if not a prerequisite for the job, was something that workers quickly develop whether they like it or not.

Healthcare on the other hand, has been a very different story. A nurse’s time is spent on their feet and taking care of patients. Tracking and recording patient data was done with a pen on a chart, filed away in a catacomb of color coded folders and accessed via “sneakernet”. In this type of workplace, there simply wasn’t a need for most nurses on the floor to have any PC skills at all. You can read more about this dilemma at Nurses.com where they look at the challenges that the industry faces as they look to adapt to the rapid adoption rate of EMR systems. Most facilities value a nurse’s experience and expertise over computer skills, opting to provide them the training they need instead of requiring that they come to the job with the skills already in hand.

As this is all well and good for memorizing the screens necessary to move a patient through the process, it isn’t doing a lot to cultivate understanding of the value that computer knowledge can bring to a nurse’s professional development. All healthcare staff have an obligation to maintain at least a minimum level of credentials, course compliance and other documentation to support the fact that they are qualified to do their job. At any point they may be called upon by their governing boards or places of employment to produce these documents and data in order to maintain their license. This collection of a person’s body of work is known as a portfolio and is used by multiple professions. The problem is that for most nurses, all of this information is either on paper and located in any number of locations or possibly online across multiple websites. Pulling it all together at a moment’s notice or even creating a summary can be an arduous task at best.

This is precisely the area where having even a rudimentary level of computer knowledge and understanding will go a very long way. Converting the traditional portfolio into something electronic which can be made accessible via a web page or email might take a little effort and understanding initially, but will save countless hours over the long term. In addition, it allows the nurse to represent their skills, expertise and competency to any of the constituents who may require it. Further, it is something which illustrates the kind of innovation that many healthcare excellence programs view in high regard.

If you want to learn more about converting your entire traditional nursing portfolio into an electronic format, have a look at the Decision Critical portfolio tools. It is a lot easier than you may think.

In either case, you gain significant control over how effectively you can improve your processes and share your information if you have deployed tools for the systematic collection of electronic data. As most healthcare organizations are working through their EMR deployment plans, the patient data layer is emerging as a key source of intelligence for improving these processes and tracking patient outcomes.

However, there must also be a consideration for the caregiver side of the house. The Electronic Competency Records (ECR) are the caregiver equivalent of the EMR. This repository adds a quality quotient into the mix, allowing you to not only see the patient’s path of care, but also each of the care givers who interacted with them along the way. This is vital information, letting organizations better align the needs of their patients with the competencies of their staff.

You can learn more about the entire competency management process here.