The winners of the Easy EHR Issues Reporting Challenge have been announced by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC).
At present, reporting EHR safety concerns is a tiresome process that causes disruption to clinical workflows. A more efficient and user-friendly mechanism is need to allow EHR users to swiftly spot, document, and report issues to their IT departments.
Quick reporting of potential safety issues will permit the root causes of issues to be discovered more quickly and for feedback to be given to EHR developers swiftly to ensure issues are resolved in the shortest possible timeframe.
The focus of the challenge was to encourage software developers to provide solutions that would help clinicians report EHR usability and safety issues more quickly and efficiently in tandem with their usual clinical workflows and make the reporting of EHR safety issues less cumbersome.
After assessing all entires, ONC chose three winners:
The 1st Place prize of $45,000 was awarded to James Madison Advisory Group, which formulated a unique solution for documenting and reporting potential EHR safety concerns. The tool can be enabled using a system tray icon or hotkey without exiting the EHR workflow. The solution operates using Windows 8 systems and above and all EHR platforms. The software tool exports information from the HHS Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) Common Formats XML and PDF, can save screenshots, and makes report delivery easier.
The 2nd Place prize and $25,000 was awarded to Pegwin which developed a software utility that clinicians can use to create and transmit safety and usability reports with three clicks of a mouse. The solution has an intuitive design, employs contextual menus, and automates Common Formats reporting as much as possible.
The 3rd Place prize and $10,000 was awarded to Jared Schwartz and his team for formulating a Google Chrome plug-in that works with IT ticketing systems. The plug-in allows more consistent recording of EHR safety issues.
Andy Gettinger, M.D., ONC chief clinical officer said that: “Enhancing the safety of health IT remains an important priority. We believe that making it easier for end users to report will help in that goal.”