Wednesday, October 29, 2014

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.

 

Monday, October 20, 2014

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.