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.