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.