Video Interview Dr. Armand Gonzalzles: BPM and EMR Workflow Management in Primary Care

Short Link: http://j.mp/5zhtCX

We caught up with Dr. Armand Gonzalzles, a Chicago-based pediatrician, after his recent presentation at HIMSS to conduct a short (eight minute) video interview, in order to explore some of the excellent questions from his audience.

Dr. Gonzalzles starts off with some general observations about EMRs, workflow management, and business process management, and the need for healthcare to catch up with other industries that are more advanced in their adoption of these technologies. He then addresses the following questions:

• How did your patients react to use of an EMR?
• Is it easy or hard to change your office workflows?
• How long have you been using the an EHR workflow system and have you ever been tempted to change?
• Is it difficult to keep the system up to date with respect to codes and drugs?
• Have you integrated patient education into your workflow? Does it save you any time?
• Could you share some general impressions about the impact of a BPM-style EMR workflow management system on your return on investment, patient satisfaction, and personal workload?

[flv:http://www.chuckwebster.com/video/interview_EMR_WFMS_BPM/interview_dr_G_040809.flv 320 240]
I am especially intrigued by Dr. Gonzalzles’ use of the phrase “business process management,” because BPM has so much to offer to the optimization of clinical outcomes, patient satisfaction, and practice profitability (particularly as EMR workflow management systems evolve into full-fledged EMR business process management systems).

P.S. (Update) I believe I was the first to present and write about an in-production EHR workflow management system, what might be called an EHR BPM system today, at the 2000 HIMSS conference in Dallas. I gave a similar presentation at the 1999 MS-HUG conference, though there was no published paper. There is, however, a blog post about the 2000 presentation, with links to the proceedings paper. From that blog post:

“In three ways, [the 2000 HIMSS presentation and paper] prefigured developments that are beginning to affect collective thinking of the HIT industry today:

• Workflow management systems (business process management today)
• Computer-supported collaborative work (groupware and workflow systems today)
• Componentized EMR architecture (software modules/plugins and service-oriented architecture today)”