Sachin Pawar, MD, explains how a surgeon with protected informatics time brokers EHR change among OR staff, Epic analysts and operations leaders. Watch below or on YouTube.

Froedtert Health organizes its EHR analysts by application, yet its surgeons work across those teams. As a result, a change built by one team can affect surgeons working with another. For about four years, a practicing surgeon with protected time has served as a bridge between them. Sachin Pawar, MD, a facial plastic and reconstructive surgeon at the Medical College of Wisconsin, is the health system’s surgical medical informatics officer. In an appearance on the healthsystemCIO Show, he described how dedicated time helps him do work that surgeon champions without protected time can struggle to fit in.

Surgery touches nearly every stage of a patient’s journey through the hospital, Pawar said. A surgeon’s work spans the clinic, preoperative preparation, the OR, procedural areas and inpatient care. Froedtert, an Epic customer, structures its analysts around applications, with separate ambulatory, inpatient and OpTime teams. OpTime is Epic’s operating room module. Consequently, work on the ambulatory team or a change to orders can affect OpTime and the surgeons who rely on it.

“We do struggle with the fact that the organization of our IT teams and analysts doesn’t necessarily reflect the practice patterns we all work in, especially as surgeons,” Pawar said. He added that the organization is getting better at it. Still, rolling out new features that touch surgeons requires alignment across several teams, he said.

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