Newly announced ACOEM guidelines simplify occupational EHR system evaluation

By Enterprise Health
Blogs Occupational health Compliance

Making the shift from D-I-Y to certified best practices for OEHRs

Employer-operated employee health clinics continue to increase in adoption and sophistication. Home-grown OEHRs, cobbled together from general-purpose EHRs and industry-specific databases, are being replaced by purpose-built OEM systems, giving time-strapped clinicians yet another burdensome task: sorting the proverbial wheat from the chaff to identify the best system for their specific needs. 

In a recent Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (JOEM) article, the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (ACOEM) has stepped in, evaluating clinical workflow concerns, assessing health information requirements and providing informatics recommendations to address the privacy, data governance, interoperability and medical surveillance concerns that are specific to occupational health.

 

Enterprise Health checks every box on the ACOEM recommendation list

The ACOEM recommendations give occupational health clinicians a framework to guide their selection and adoption of OEHRs and lay out goalposts for software developers seeking to improve the practice of OEM. While many solutions will meet some of the requirements, Enterprise Health meets — and often exceeds — all of the following:

 

  • Health data governance and stewardship: OEHRs facilitate health data governance and stewardship through controls that are transparent and accessible at the point of care.   
  • Privacy and security: OEHRs ensure the privacy of employee health and exposure information and maintain EHR industry standards for security.
  • User access controls and permissions management: OEHRs utilize access controls and permissions management to facilitate access to occupational health data.
  • Interoperability: OEHRs support interoperability and the exchange of electronic personal health information (PHI) through application programming interfaces (APIs) and current data standards.
  • Documentation and data entry: OEHRs facilitate structured documentation of occupational exposures and hazards to improve quality and outcomes in occupational health.
  • Clinical decision support: OEHRs implement clinical decision support (CDS) systems to improve decision making at the point of care.
  • Reporting and medical surveillance: OEHRs enable real-time reporting, epidemiology, and medical surveillance to identify sentinel events and prevent occupational injuries and illnesses.
  • Patient education materials: OEHRs improve access to easy-to-read, multilingual patient education materials relevant to the employee diagnosis and context.
  • Employee health portal: OEHRs connect employees to an occupational health portal that fosters worker participation and engagement in occupational health.
  • Workflow customization: OEHRs allow sufficient flexibility to enable OEM providers to customize OEHR processes to existing clinic workflows.

Real-world scenarios highlight OEM use cases and technology requirements

The recommendations include use case scenarios that highlight common information management challenges and how each proposed recommendation contributes to improved care. In every example cited, the Enterprise Health system excels, providing simple and efficient user experiences that can improve the quality of OEM practices and promote health and well-being in the workplace.

 

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