Regain Your Voice in 2015: Top Health IT Resolutions to Boost Provider Satisfaction

It’s 10 p.m. on a Friday in an urban emergency room. Shotgun wounds and car accidents come flying through the door. Amid all the chaos we find doctors spending more time looking at EMR screens than their patients, so they are compliant with the hospital’s electronic medical record (EMR) software. In fact, one study found doctors spend 44 percent of their time on the documentation associated with EMRs.

That’s almost 5-and-a-half hours of a 12-hour shift NOT engaged in direct, quality patient care.

2015 is going to be a big year in healthcare and, possibly an even bigger one in health IT. There is a lot of innovative tech emerging, as well as current technology making substantial upgrades. Dictation is a great example. Many clinicians preferred dictation for documenting their patient encounters, but when the HITECH Act’s Meaningful Use was implemented they thought they had to let it go.

They thought wrong. Dictation can make the EMR process more efficient, and still achieve Meaningful Use. When we give doctors back their voices, patient care improves, documentation errors decline and providers get back to focusing on doing what they love.

4 Ways Doctors Can Regain Their Voice in 2015

Bring Back Dictation: MRs and EHRs are an important tool for documentation, but the time doctors spend dealing with documentation takes them away from their first priority. Turn-key solutions that combine automatic speech recognition with trained medical transcriptionists can unchain providers from their tedious documentation tasks.

Engage More Patients: Did you become a doctor to help people or to stare at a computer screen?  Documentation assistance allows providers to spend more quality time with patients and see more of them.

More Reasonable Hours: Doctors are expected to not only see a high-volume client load, but also document each encounter without any errors or risks. Medical transcriptionists edit dictated patient encounters into a structured data format, which can be dropped in any EMR ready for Consolidated CDA. That means fewer late nights and more vacation time for doctors, nurses and the whole medical staff.

Computing Anytime, Anywhere: Clinicians and other medical professionals use high-tech devices for a variety of tasks every day. Sometimes this requires them to be confined to one place, but in 2015, cloud and mobile technology will give them even more freedom. In fact, doctors can dictate and upload their patient encounters and even review their schedule and e-sign from their phones.

ERs aren’t the only hectic healthcare environment. Specialty physicians, primary care doctors and other medical professionals tackle hefty challenges in documentation every day. It’s time we cut away the red tape, boosting provider satisfaction and the quality of patient care. It’s time for doctors to regain their voice.

Happier Holidays with Health IT

The holidays might be a break for some folks, but not for those working in healthcare. Patients who put off taking care of those minor aches and pains suddenly flow in like a herd of reindeer. Holiday fiascos can land dad in the emergency room and mom at primary care for high blood pressure. Specialty providers, like podiatrists and dermatologists, get bombarded with appointments from patients using holiday leave to address issues they’ve been ignoring throughout the busy year.

The healthcare rush can really impact your workplace. The workflow jams, stress inflates and employee morale can plummet. This is an environment ripe for rushed patient encounters and documentation errors.

Perhaps one of the best holiday gifts you could offer your medical staff would be less stress. Skip the ham or the gift card and give them something that can help their jobs run more smoothly, not just during the holiday season, but also all year long.

4 Ways to Lower Stress in the Healthcare Workplace

Meaningful Work: Most medical personnel complain about the time electronic records programs take away from their patient contact. Give them the gift of dictation, allowing them to document patient encounters quickly and effectively, while still achieving Meaningful Use. This way they can turn away from computer screens and focus their attention back on their patients.

Smooth Workflow: We live by our smartphones. They remind us of important dates, keep us connected to our friends and families and organize our professional lives. Isn’t it about time healthcare caught up? Get your medical professionals a smartphone app that lets them dictate against their appointment schedule, review and e-sign documents.  

Reduce documentation errors: Healthcare administrators can help medical staff improve the quality and completeness of their patient records by giving them tools to help them populate their EMR/EHR systems more effectively. Implementing a documentation system that includes valuable narrative without taking more time improves the quality of records.

Increase Morale: Medical professionals need a solution that increases physician productivity and helps them refocus on providing high-quality patient care instead of documentation minutia. As the quality of patient care increases, the medical office culture becomes more light-hearted and other medical staff can focus back on their priorities. When the doctors are happier, everyone is happier.

Do these all sound like perfect gifts? Can’t decide on just one? You don’t have to. InfraWare's No-click Documentation solution offers your doctors dictation and medical transcription that will integrate into any EMR for Meaningful Use Stage 2 compliance. If your practice is ready for a boost in morale and productivity, give us a call today to schedule your free consultation.

New health IT data architecture improves doctor-patient experience

Originally published on TechPoint on Oct. 28, 2014

Recently TechPoint, a central hub of Indiana technology news, invited me to discuss a topic I've presented on at conferences for MGMA, HIMSS and AHDI throughout the year. While I have spoken on many issues, the most salient one, and the one discussed in this TechPoint blog, is how Meaningful Use can be achieved dictation. 

Photo: TechPoint

New health IT data architecture improves doctor-patient experience

by Nick Mahurin, TechPoint Contributing Blogger, Oct. 28, 2014

I am delighted to be speaking today at the National Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) Conference in Las Vegas. The topic of my presentation at the conference is “Consolidated CDA & Meaningful Use,” which are hot-button issues among physicians nationwide due to stringent, though well-meaning new regulations.

What is Meaningful Use? Meaningful Use (MU) embodies government regulations that require healthcare providers to implement Electronic Medical Records (EMR) programs and attest to using them in a meaningful way. Regulators want proof that doctors and thereby their patients are benefiting from mandated new technologies.

As simple and logical as that may sound, it has not been easy. According to a report from the Health Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS), Approximately 1.2 billion clinical documents are produced in the United States each year and until recently, 60% of clinical documentation was transcribed from dictation. Imagine the impact on your business if you suddenly had to start capturing more than half of your data in a completely new way.

Read the full article here.

 

Busting the Biggest Myth in Healthcare Documentation

Doctors, how much time do you spend on healthcare documentation? Maybe you click through your EMR trying to document the patient encounter which may give the impression you aren’t really listening.  Or, maybe you wait till the end of the day, when you’re stiff and tired, knowing you still have to sit down at a computer to enter your notes.  Either way, you’re chained to clerical work when you could be seeing more patients or at home with your family.

What if we could show you how to see more patients’, give them more attention AND still leave the office at a reasonable time?  What if we told you that you can go back to dictating your notes, saving time and money, all while achieving Meaningful Use?  Wouldn’t that be an improvement?

When government regulations required healthcare providers to implement Electronic Medical Records (EMR) programs and incentivized you to use them in a meaningful way, you may have been told dictation could no longer be used.  Instead, you had to point, click and key directly into EMR screens to document each patient encounter.  It also eliminated much of the rich narrative data that had commonly been included in patient records.  When providers demanded to dictate, many were given a front-end speech program, but that bogged them down with editing errors.

Dictation, in fact, can be used to achieve Meaningful Use.  It can lower risk of reimbursement loss by including that rich narrative context.  It can improve efficiency and productivity.  It can make your job easier and your patients happier.  After all, patients are also going to be seeing their documentation in the portal.

InfraWare’s No-click Documentationsm solution allows doctors to dictate, thereby leveraging the skills of faster, lower-cost transcriptionists and empowering physicians, like you, to take back your days.  

How you ask?  Consolidated Clinical Documentation Architecture (C-CDA) and Meaningful Use Stage 2 (MU2) is the answer.

The Health Story Project developed C-CDA, which is a set of standard templates that support both narrative and structured data within the same document.  And the good news is that EMRs are required to be able to send and receive C-CDA documents to achieve MU2 certification.  Using InfraWare, medical transcriptionists can create these C-CDA documents from your dictation.  They will flow right into your EMR.

So the nightmare is over.  Now you can dictate again.

It’s Not Just a Dream: A common format and secure transmission for electronic health records

One of the reasons I really enjoy giving presentations to medical professionals is that it allows me an opportunity to hear about the role of electronic documentation from different perspectives. As a small business owner with a fairly niche market, I understand the diversity of needs and concerns when it comes to electronic records and file sharing in healthcare.

At a presentation last week on Consolidated CDA, an audience member posed an interesting question toward the end of the talk - "Isn't this a simple matter of agreeing on a format for records, consistent with what has been performed in nearly all other industries?" 

The short answer is, "yes.” Sharing medical files securely is simply a matter of agreement on a common format, then agreeing on a safe way to transmit that content.

The short answer, however, has not necessarily been a simple one. It has been a slow process, starting with getting the decision makers in the vast landscape of the medical and IT fields to even begin discussing common formats at a granular level. Unlike large corporations with top-down leadership, healthcare is very segmented with distributed leadership. This was just one of many challenges that needed to be ironed out to inch forward. After many years and immense negotiation among hundreds of volunteers, private and public funding, a common format, Consolidated CDA, finally began to emerge.

While we had a common format, we also needed a secure way to transmit records.   HIPAA requirements restrict the technical ways information can be shared to ensure privacy.  That is a significant limiting factor. Health IT professionals’ nerves get shaky just thinking about the penalties associated with even occasional errors in transmission of protected healthcare information (PHI). I believe that, while we need the simplicity of an email-style transmission, we simply can’t afford to proceed with a solution that includes the problems commonly associated with emails. We’ve all experienced the dreaded accidental click of the “reply all” button at one time or another, but there are even more daily issues, such as spam, incorrect addresses, autofill mistakes and unverified identities. Health Information Exchanges (HIE) are one answer, but they aren’t available in all regions.  Direct messaging, a national project to encrypt and securely exchanging healthcare data via the Internet, is a newer answer.  Health Information Systems Providerss (HISPs) are designed to form trust relationships that will overcome the concerns commonly associated with regular email when Direct Messaging is used.

Some healthcare IT professionals tend to be a bit overstated when they describe the current limitation of HISPs.  In an effort to educate, they often emphasize the challenges of the current status of development and implementation, instead of looking forward.  The challenges we face today are real, but temporary. With consortiums like the Health Story Project and the development of Consolidated CDA, they will be resolved in the near future. I believe we will see these issues resolved as soon as within the next 12 months, leading to a resurgence of transcription for Meaningful Use 2.