HRM Task Force: Reducing the administrative burden of digital reports
TORONTO, Oct. 17, 2023 /CNW/ - OntarioMD, a leading organization dedicated to advancing digital health solutions in Ontario, is pleased to announce the pivotal role of the collaborative HRM® (Health Report Manager) Task Force in addressing the concerns of Ontario doctors about the volume and quality of the digital reports they receive from hospitals. The HRM Task Force has spent the past year evaluating solutions resulting in two reports. The first report contains report delivery recommendations for hospitals and the second report contains EMR usability recommendations for EMR vendors. The recommendations from both reports were made to help doctors spend less time handling reports and allow more time for patient care. OntarioMD will work with pilot hospitals and EMR vendors in the coming months to trial these recommendations.
HRM is a digital health tool that delivers electronic patient reports from hospitals to doctors' electronic medical record (EMR) systems, where they are filed in each patient's record that's accessed during every patient visit. Whenever a patient is in the hospital, their family doctor finds out about it within minutes thanks to HRM.
When HRM was launched across the province 10 years ago, it was praised as a significant improvement over faxed hospital reports flooding doctors' offices. Faxed reports were hard to manage, and doctors had to pore over the contents to search for the patient information they needed. It's much easier to search for information in digital reports.
"HRM has become a victim of its own success, as more report types, notifications of hospital admissions, discharges and transfers, COVID-19 assessment reports and notifications of positive test results have been added to its scope", said Robert Fox, OntarioMD's CEO. "These amount to millions of reports every year and have become overwhelming for doctors, contributing to burnout."
Meanwhile, hospitals are delivering more reports as PDFs. The formatting of PDF reports makes them harder for community-based clinicians to search for data. Report authors need to improve the reports by making them shorter and making it easier for doctors to find the most important information.
OntarioMD is a subsidiary of the Ontario Medical Association. The work of the HRM Task Force aligns with the OMA's Prescription for Ontario, Doctors' 5-Point Plan for Better Health Care – a roadmap of realistic and achievable recommendations to fix the gaps in our health-care system including the administrative burden on physicians. Reducing the volume of reports from hospitals to EMRs, and improving the searchability of reports, would go a long way to easing the burden of reviewing digital reports and ensuring patient safety is maintained.
A handful of hospitals have already initiated work to reduce the number of digital and faxed reports going to doctors. These proactive actions and the ongoing dialogue with hospitals, vendors and clinicians to streamline and standardize digital reports, when aligned to the HRM Task Force recommendations, have the potential to introduce early gains for community-based physicians.
Implementing these recommendations is important for Ontario clinicians. When these recommendations are realized, HRM will provide them with better information that supports patient care and there will be a decrease in the administrative burden they face. OntarioMD is committed to this work and is very appreciative of the collaborative support of Ontario Health. Together, we are committed to advancing these recommendations.
Visit OntarioMD.ca to download the Sending Facility Service Standards Report and the EMR Usability Report.
The HRM Task Force members included clinicians, the Ontario Medical Association, Ontario Health, the Ontario Hospital Association, hospitals, electronic medical record vendors, and hospital information system vendors who play a role, or can influence, hospital report delivery to clinicians. Through the HRM Task Force, facilitated by OntarioMD, these stakeholders worked on report standards that would address doctors' demands for improvements.
OntarioMD is a leader in advancing health care through digital innovation. The organization collaborates with clinicians and health-care stakeholders to develop and deploy digital health solutions that improve patient care, and practice efficiency. OntarioMD is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Ontario Medical Association. It receives funding from the Province of Ontario to support family physicians, specialists, nurse practitioners and their staff to adopt and efficiently use digital health technology to care for their patients.
The views expressed in this publication are the views of OntarioMD and do not necessarily reflect those of the Province.
SOURCE OntarioMD Inc.
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