Meet Dr. Sanders!  He is our resident Cardiologist/HybridChart Creator who will be sharing his challenges as a physician, patient stories, trends in healthcare and more in our Disruptive Behavior series with Dr. Sanders. In this post, he discusses how you can stop shifting gears with HybridChart.

Almost every hospital right now is using an EHR.  Personally, I cover six hospitals and they are all using something different. For example, two hospitals are using Cerner, but are using two completely different versions of Cerner, so it might as well be a different product altogether.  It just shows me how disconnected medicine is.  Every time I go to a new hospital, I need to completely switch gears in my head of how I’m going to get data, take care of the patient and write a note. Every time you step into a new building, the process is completely different and it’s extremely frustrating.

Stop Shifting Gears with HybridChart

In terms of keeping track of my patients, there’s a census management tool for all of these EMRs that isolate your patients for you, but they all do it in a very different way.  To m ake it more complicated,  it’s not connected to your office and some of them won’t allow you to share your patient lists. HybridChart is the one constant—it’s a constant across every single one of your facilities that you’re going to—it doesn’t matter where you are.  

HybridChart is a consistent way to manage your census—especially in a world where every hospital is using a different system.  HybridChart is a uniform, consistent census management tool that is immune to the cross platforms that you’re on.  In terms of charge capture, discharge management and communication, with HybridChart you don’t have to learn six different ways to do it or change depending on what building you’re in—it’s always the same.  Every time.  HybridChart really stands across multiple environments and multiple platforms and is always consistent.  Ultimately, that is going to save you time and money because you don’t have to be constantly switching gears. 

The Disconnect Within the Industry

There is a common theme to hospital based EHRs where I think they all are trying to accomplish the same things: they are trying to give you access to a patient’s virtual chart, they are trying to present to you all of the data (whether it be labs and radiology), they’re giving you order entry and they’re giving you the ability to write a clinical note.  They are all trying to accomplish the same goal.   The problem is that they are all trying to do this in a very different way.  So the user interface and the user experience is dramatically different.  Also, the workflow is totally different, the hoops you have to jump through are totally different.  There are so many different ways to fill out notes, for example.  It’s like two different languages!   

It is a noticeable, awkward gear shift when I have to go from institution to another.  An internal ‘ugh’ that can really start to wear you down mentally. Especially if you are visiting multiple hospitals on the same day, it’s like loading in a whole new order set into your brain of how do you do something.  It slows you down!  You are adding in so much extra time just to switch gears. 

Not only do hospitals have different systems, but they are continuously updating them so that they are completely different.  It’s an ever-changing world where they are always uprooting things.  

Remember the Time…

In the olden days, you would walk into any hospital and find the chart rack. The chart racks were so standardized that I could walk into any hospital anywhere in the country and I could pull the chart, open it up to progress notes, read three notes and I would know exactly what was going on with the patient.  In terms of writing my own notes, I’d flip to a blank page write my notes, flip to the order section and write my orders, put the chart back, flag the chart, and I’d walk off the floor.  I could do that in every single  hospital in America 15 years ago without any training. But now, every single building is so different now along with every version of software that building uses that there is no way that you could do that again in today’s day and age.  

Here is where HybridChart is different. 

The beauty of HybridChart is that we’re solving the real problem of not having to walk around with pieces of paper, but we are not introducing new problems.  There are no new problems.  We’ve done it in a way where you don’t solve three problem and create four new ones, you solve three problems.  Period.  And that’s the trick to good software—don’t replace clunky paper problems with complicated modern electronic problems. 

That’s the real challenge to a software product to be able to make sure that they’re not necessarily digitizing every single piece of the process because sometimes there is some value to the human brain being involved.  The hospital EHR is a great example of how you can solve certain problems and create a massive amount of new ones.  Versus HybridChart which solves problems and then solves more problems.   You get a cascade of benefits all the way down the line without generating any new problems. 

Want to learn more about HybridChart? Watch our demo!

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Dr. Gregory Sanders is a Harvard-trained, practicing cardiologist and founder and CEO of HybridChart. He has been coding since the 1980s and has spent his medical career focusing on improving processes. His patient care skills earned him recognition as one of Phoenix Magazine’s TOP DOCs. He lives in Scottsdale with his family.