The CHCA Clinical Committee

To ensure all technology projects remain clinician driven and thus clinician accepted, CHCA established an Electronic Health Records Clinical Committee in 2005 in conjunction with its launch of the Electronic Health Records (EHR) project. Teamed with CHCA’s EHR personnel, this committee is responsible to review and approve all clinical content development, add-on functionality, clinical interface mapping and testing, and utilization standards within the EHR system.

To foster a clinician driven process and ensure compliance with each member’s documentation needs, it is a requirement that each participating organization assign their Medical Director and Nursing Director (or equivalents) to engage in active participation for related activities. Communication exchanges for this committee occur monthly, at a minimum. Face-to-face meetings are held at member locations, rotated amongst the collaborator organizations, on a bi-monthly schedule with monthly interim conference calls. Additional communications occur between calls or meetings via e-mail or the use of the CHCA Intranet.

However, face to face meetings are required for critical content review efforts and approval. An added benefit of this type of communication by the membership has been the sharing of "best practices," workflows, operational efficiencies, and protocol enhancements.  

Of important note to the project is that CHCA has a hardened process that follows industry norms for proper software development and enhancement standards. Within this process, there is absolutely no functionality or template change that occurs without Clinical Committee representatives testing and providing proof of his or her own quality review approval.

This clinician acceptance process also applies to version upgrades released by the vendor. The clinicians are given access to the test or training environments to log in and review the changes, test the functionality, and then e-mail feedback to CHCA development staff. Interfaces also require clinician approval as there is a significant amount of data that is mapped from one system to another. CHCA relies on clinician participation to review and approve all data mapping such as lab result data.

CHCA’s official legal agreements with its members that join the EHR project underscore the importance and requirement of clinician participation and emphasize that the member is responsible for the accuracy of all clinical documentation. The Clinical Committee Chair is Dr. George VanBuren (of Manatee County Rural Health Services) and the Vice-Chair is Dr. Jerry Williamson (of Collier Health Services, Inc.).