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MAXIMIZING YOUR EMR: Put the bells and whistles to work for your office<
by: Suz Redfearn
It was the middle of the night, and one of Tim Baird’s patients was in the emergency room. The ER doctor treating her needed more information before he could proceed. He was pretty sure he’d be unable to obtain the answers he needed at that late hour, but he called Baird’s OB/GYN office anyway and had him paged. Baird awoke to the beeping of his pager, but rather than call the ER physician with what little information he could recall about that patient, he powered up his laptop and quickly downloaded her entire medical file. He was able to give the ER doc anything he needed to know to treat the patient immediately, including her updated lab work. ”The doctor in the ER was amazed,” Baird recalls. But Baird wasn’t amazed. He says instant access to his patients’ info anywhere, anytime is just one of the daily upsides to fully utilizing his practice's electronic medical records (EMR) system, which went live when his practice opened its doors in the summer of 2004. It didn’t happen right away, says Baird, but after about a year, he and his two physician colleagues at Women's Physicians of Jacksonville found themselves well-versed in and enjoying just about every application their system offered. After all, he explains, they couldn’t afford not to. The practice spent $146,000 to implement the system, and it drops $1,600 a month on IT maintenance. But Baird admits that the learning curve was a steep one. “When you first start using your system, you're just trying to survive,” he explains. “But after a while, several of the really nice components — the bells and whistles — start to become apparent. Then you pick the ones you're most comfortable with and you work hard to come up to speed on those.” Unfortunately, Baird and his colleagues aren't the norm when it comes to sucking the marrow from their EMR. Only between 9 percent and 16 percent of physicians’ offices have EMR systems, and only a small percentage of those use the majority of the applications their EMRs offer. According to Rosemarie Nelson, a health IT consultant with the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA), there is no survey that shows what percentage of practices adopt their EMRs as robustly as did Baird and his colleagues — but she estimates that only 30 percent of practices with EMRs do the same. “Generally, most EMRs go unimplemented,” says Nelson. “And once fully implemented, they stall for one reason or another.” Why? “Change management,” she says. “It requires physicians to change the way they document their visits, and that’s hard to do after years of paper charting.” But, Nelson adds, once a practice manages to get its physicians over that initial learning hump, the rewards can be amazing. MAXIMIZING OFFICE EFFICIENCY Take, for example, interoffice electronic communications — the process by which doctors and nurses communicate about patients using computers or hand-held devices while the patient in question is in the office. Most EMRs include this function or it can be added on, but few practices take advantage of it — much to their detriment, says Pam Wostarek. Wostarek, the regional implementation manager for Horsham, Pa.-based NextGen Healthcare Information Systems Inc., explains that a doctor employing this option can, for example, make notes on a handheld device about a patient during her office visit and instantly send those notes to a nurse, who may need to act immediately. In addition to enhancing efficiency, the device leaves an electronic paper trail. “Doctors are used to walking out into the hall and talking to somebody during or after a visit — but that’s not documented anywhere,” says Wostarek. “Th< |
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