Physicians Practice - January 2008 - (Page 49)

IDEALAB ‘HOW I GOT OVER MY EMR EXCUSES’ EVERYONE HAS A ‘REASON’ FOR STALLING THE TRANSITION TO ELECTRONIC RECORDS. WHAT’S YOURS? B Y S T E V E R YA N , M D When my partner and I opened our family practice ﬁve years ago, our goal was simple: to give our patients the highest quality of care available. By then we had 16 years of practice experience, and so we recognized the costs and problems associated with a paper-based documentation system. We wanted to open our practice — Carefree Family Medicine is a two-physician, one-nurse practitioner practice in Colorado Springs, Colo. patients, our practice satisfaction, and our return-on-investment, is the beneﬁt worth the cost? These questions (and so many others) are daunting, and can quickly become excuses for delaying indeﬁnitely or eschewing altogether the transition to electronic records. My partner and I hired an outside consultant who helped us get beyond our excuses; we eventually settled on HealthMatics EMR by customize to ﬁt individual needs. Yes, it may be more work up-front for you to do this customization, but it’s worth the effort. It is vital to ﬁnd an EMR that allows such customization. “I’m just not into all that technology stuff.” In our EMR search, we had the same concerns that most practices have: Will using an EMR make that much of a difference? How do we even begin to choose a system? How long is the learning curve? Is the benefit worth the cost? BIG QUESTIONS — with the best technology available to improve efﬁciency in communication and documentation. Our providers see about 6,500 patients a year. In our EMR search prior to opening, we had the same concerns that most practices have as they consider a switch from paper to electronic records: Will using an EMR make that much of a difference in the way we practice? How do we even begin to choose a system? How long is the learning curve once we’ve selected and installed a system? In terms of the care of our WWW.PHYSICIANSPRACTICE.COM That’s OK. It is not important for physicians or staff to have computer or networking skills to use an EMR. It is important to ﬁnd a vendor with an outstanding training program and a proven implementation process. A good company will have training and implementation processes in place to make your practice’s transition as easy as possible. The best way to learn if an EMR vendor can back up the promises of training and implementation is to ask for references. Speak to previous physicians and staff to learn more about their training process. More often than not, these practices will have their own EMR tips to share with you. “I’m waiting for someone else to pay for it.” Allscripts. But every physician has an “EMR excuse” at one time oranother, and I have heard them all. Here are my favorites: “There is no EMR that ﬁts my specialty.” With the growth in the EMR industry over the past several years, this simply is no longer true. There are systems with built-in knowledge to ﬁt practices of just about any specialty. Yet even with per-specialty knowledge, it is important to ﬁnd a system that you and your staff can Many practices have been waiting for months or years for insurers, hospital systems, the government, or some other group to announce that it will fund an EMR purchase. In the meantime, they forget about how much money they could have been saving. We saw a return on our investment immediately after implementing our EMR system at Carefree Family Medicine. We eliminated the costs of materials to create and maintain paper records, ﬁle storage costs, and costs associated with copying requested medical records. Human resource costs were signiﬁcantly reduced. We no longer had the need for full-time employees devoted to maintaining and retrieving JANUARY 2008 | PHYSICIANS PRACTICE | 49 http://WWW.PHYSICIANSPRACTICE.COM

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Physicians Practice - January 2008

Physicians Practice - January 2008 Contents The Bigger Picture: Fixing Medicaid Letters Physicians Practice Pearls: You Can Teach an Old Dog New Tricks Noteworthy Cover Story: Fee Schedule Survey: 2007 Results Adding Ancillaries: Bucking the Practice Ask the Experts Idealab: 'How I Got Over My EMR Excuses' Technology: Don't Be Denied The Tech Doctor: Blessing or Curse? The Administrator's Desk: Learning From the Best Coding Career: To Partner, or Not? Management: Controlling Your Inventory Human Resources: How to Fire an Enployee Finance: Beyond Reimbursment - How to Fix Your Mix Classifieds Advertiser Index

Physicians Practice - January 2008

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