Behind the scenes of some of Crossings’ most successful solutions

Meet Ehab Hanna, MD

When Crossings Healthcare Solutions sees a need, they find a solution. Just ask Ehab Hanna, MD, Chief Medical Information Officer at Universal Health Services, Inc.

Dr. Hanna and his Crossings colleagues established a team to develop applications to sit atop the Cerner Electronic Medical Record (EMR). The goals were clear: Enhance physician workflow and keep it simple.

“We knew that EMRs would be disruptive to physicians and that there would be huge resistance to asking them to change what they’ve been
doing for decades,” he says. “We wanted to give them a product they want to use, that will actually help them.”

Adding Amenities to the Cerner EMR

Cerner built an application development kit and invited organizations to license apps and enter the 2014 Cerner Physician Idol competition. Dr. Hanna and his team created the Physician Communication Tool, which allows physicians to communicate patient information to the entire care team, and renew or discontinue orders, without interrupting workflow. “People loved it,” recalls Dr. Hanna.

In fact, the tool won the Physician Idol physician engagement competition. Later, it also won the 2014 ‘Accelerator Award’ from Clinical Innovation and Technology magazine and the 2015 Cerner Documentation All Star Award.

Automating Physician Documentation

After the success of the Physician Communication Tool, Dr. Hanna and his team at Crossings identified another challenge: How to customize the clinical notes for different specialties, even for different physician note-taking styles within the same specialty.

The team developed several standard templates physicians can customize to aggregate and share clinical data. Next, Dr. Hanna and his colleagues seamlessly incorporated unobtrusive quality prompts and notifications for clinicians to enhance clinical decision support.

This innovation became Crossings’ Enhanced Dynamic Documentation Solution.

“It makes less work for IT to build, maintain and support, and also empowers physicians to do what they want to do. A win-win situation,” Dr. Hanna explains.

The solution proved particularly valuable to the discharge process. Automating physician documentation and quality measures smoothed and sped up patient discharge, eliminating nearly 90 percent of transcription costs.