Give Your Lab a Competitive Edge through Physician and Patient Centered EMRs

When a practice adopts an EMR, it becomes their clinical cockpit for practice workflow and patient chart management—and a big part of that is lab orders and results. To be competitive, laboratories must move beyond merely supplying functional HL7 interfaces to EMRs. Where possible, they should integrate into the EMR-based workflow, making lab ordering and reporting an easy-to-use centerpiece of any successful collaborative equation.

What’s more, placing lab orders in the EMR will be a Meaningful Use (MU) requirement for physician practices in 2014. They’re going to need help setting up their EMR orders — and with the right knowledge, you can help!

PLUS — attendees will also receive a free white paper on physician-centric lab ordering and reporting.

And, get answers to your own questions during the live question and answer session immediately following the presentation.

Tom Landholt is a practicing family physician and consultant on using technology to improve clinical care delivery and financial performance. He has more than 17 years of experience utilizing Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) as a physician. He works with companies like GE Healthcare, Qvera, Ignis, and various QIOs and health care systems developing and improving new workflows and data exchanges.

Dr. Landholt previously served as a clinical consultant with GE Healthcare, was the medical director for Kryptiq Corporation, and served as Medical Director for Health Information Technology at MassPRO.

Pat Wolfram has more than 15 years of experience integrating Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) with lab services, radiology departments, hospital CDRs, and HIE repositories. His team works with physicians and their practice staff every day implementing orders and results into the practice’s EMR workflow.

Prior to Ignis, Mr. Wolfram was the vice president of EMR integration at MedicaLogic, and the global product manager for EMR integration at GE Healthcare. In 2001, MedicaLogic’s EMR received KLAS’s No. 1 ranking for integration services in the ambulatory EMR category. Wolfram is also a past chairman of the HL7 marketing committee.

Ignis Systems was commissioned by CCHIT (Certification Commission for Health Information Technology) to create test suites to validate Lab-to-EMR integration.

With hundreds of vendors jumping into the EMR market over the past few years, many of them inexperienced, it's not surprising that support for lab orders and results runs the gamut from robust to nonexistent.

And since Meaningful Use Stage 2 requires CPOE (computerized physician order entry), which EMR your customers pick is a choice with very important consequences for your lab.

To most middleware vendors, all EMRs are alike: just one end of a data pipe between the clinic and the lab. But in a world where a doctor's decision to send an order to your competitor is as easy as clicking a mouse, your lab's success will depend on the ability to compete on the EMR desktop.

That's where Ignis is different. Because we understand that the most critical point in the connection between your lab and the clinic is the very last inch — the place where the clinician touches it.

Ignis has successfully implemented the EMR-Link solution to deliver clean, complete, error-free orders by connecting over 6,000 clinicians nationwide with 100 national and regional labs. These practices continue to advise us how to set up orders and results more efficiently and how to improve the ordering and reporting workflows in their EMR. You, the lab, benefit from efficient and happy practices.