From the onset of the coronavirus pandemic to the aftermath of the presidential election, 2020 delivered several unprecedented events that underscored the importance of timely access to accurate, verifiable information.

Within health care, interoperability advances such as SMART on FHIR have ignited new ways to securely and efficiently connect applications into EHR systems—enhancing clinical workflows, patient engagement, quality of care, and more.

Yet, just as we must fact-check health claims made in new year’s resolution-themed infomercials, health system leaders must weed through each supplier’s marketing claims to select the FHIR-enabled apps that deliver long-term value.

From our experience in implementing Krames On FHIR^® across 90+ U.S. hospitals to date— where it’s trusted by more than 50,000 physicians to engage their more than 265,000 unique patients—there are two must-ask questions to answer before implementing a Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources-enabled (FHIR) patient education and engagement application.

Question 1: Does this FHIR application integrate with the diverse EHR workflows that your clinicians need (and expect)?

Pretested and pre-certified with Epic^®, Krames On FHIR has completed a rigorous review to ensure that it meets the highest technical and security standards. This means the technical integration is straightforward and as standardized as possible.

Krames On FHIR has preconfigured, in-EHR workflows tailored to the unique needs of ambulatory, emergency, bedside, and telehealth care settings. It’s actively used by clinicians in several of the nation’s top hospitals and health systems to engage patients with video, interactive, and print resources.

Integrated directly within the provider’s EHR workflow and surfacing education tailored to each patient’s needs or physician’s preference, Krames On FHIR eliminates unnecessary apps, clicks, and delays. It’s also updated in real-time to ensure your caregivers and patients have access to the most current, clinically validated content, and your IT departments can take manual content updates off of their to-do list.

Question 2: How will we ensure physicians start and continue to use this new FHIR resource?

For a FHIR-enabled patient education application to deliver on its stated aims, physicians must use it habitually and continuously. An experienced, proven implementation team is vital to long-term adoption. Our Krames project managers and technical specialists guide you through the implementation, rollout, transition, and continued adoption using training materials and documentation that have been time-tested and refined over three years of implementations.

Krames recognizes that any change to your clinical workflow requires change management and clear, continued communication across your technical, clinical informatics, and patient experience teams. Your dedicated Krames team offers insight to anticipate risks and advise on frequent questions such as the most optimal strategy for cutting over from a legacy system or the governance of custom or locally-developed patient education resources.  

After go-live, your Krames team will provide transparency and insights into physician, nursing, and care team adoption of the tool, enabling you to recognize and celebrate super users, as well as target outreach and training to areas where usage may be lagging.

Since steady and sustained communication is vital to driving culture change, we also have an open feedback loop with end users to ensure we’re continuously improving the user experience by reducing the number of clicks, and improving the speed of areas such as the app launch time and the search function. We provide your team with opportunities to continuously highlight wins to your user community to further fuel adoption.