American Academy of Ophthalmology Establishes Electronic Health Record Standards

The American Academy of Ophthalmology (Academy) has taken a proactive role to ensure that electronic health records (EHR) will support quality patient care, enhance physician to physician communication, and meet the “meaningful use” standards required by healthcare reform policies. The Academy’s Medical Information Technology Committee (MITC) has developed a list of the special requirements needed to make EHR systems as intuitive and efficient as possible for ophthalmology practices.
These key functions are summarized in Special Requirements for Electronic Health Records for Ophthalmology, a report available in the journal Ophthalmology online and forthcoming in the Aug. 1 issue. The lead author is Dr. Michael F. Chiang from the Departments of Ophthalmology & Medical Informatics and Clinical Epidemiology at Oregon Health & Science University and the chairman of the Academy’s Medical Information Technology Committee.
The paper includes the list of 17 “essential” and six “desirable” features in the areas of Clinical Documentation, Ophthalmic Vital Signs and Laboratory Studies, Medical and Surgical Management, and Ophthalmic Measurement and Imaging Devices. The guidelines are intended to be used by ophthalmologists and their staffs to help identify important features when searching for EHR systems.
“Our recommendations define what will make a system work efficiently within the unique workflow and data management needs of an ophthalmology practice,” Dr. Chiang said. “The Academy is also urging the adoption of common data standards to in order to optimize the delivery of time-critical patient information and enable physicians to provide the very best in patient care.”
On July 6, the MITC hosted a webinar for representatives of 15 EHR companies to urge them to build in key functions identified in the journal article. Flora Lum, MD, deputy director of the H. Dunbar Hoskins Jr., M.D. Center for Quality Eye Care, led the webinar.
The recommendations address how an EHR system should accommodate certain areas of ophthalmic practice, including:
Supporting documentation in and transitions between the office and operating room, capturing, tracking and displaying “vital signs of the eye,” such as visual acuity and incorporating hand-drawn sketches or annotations into records.
EHR companies will be asked to respond as to how their systems match up against the list of essential and desirable features. Information detailing the vendors responses will be provided to Academy members in the future and the Academy will continue to work with the vendors to help them understand and evaluate the recommendations.