Physician's Practice - November 2008 - (Page 55)

THE TECH DOCTOR EVALUATING PAPERLESS LABS ELECTRONIC LABS CAN BOOST YOUR EFFICIENCY ONCE YOU GET PAST THE IMPLEMENTATION PROCESS B Y J O N AT H A N M c C A L L I S T E R Depending on your specialty, how much time you spend reviewing labs can vary. Regardless, it’s critical to keep a handle on the inbound stream of lab results from your external lab partners. Whether your facility is sending labs to a nationally recognized lab services provider, or just across the street to your afﬁliate hospital, electronic lab results could make your life easier. With a little focused exploration, you may be able to eliminate that sense of dread every morning, when you see your ofﬁce fax machine ﬂashing “low toner,” buried under a pile of faxed labs…while you wonder if any got “lost in transmission.” How you implement electronic lab results is largely contingent on your current information technology infrastructure. If your practice has an EMR system in place, integrating electronic lab results is less daunting. For the purposes of this article, let’s assume that your facility has some type of networked computer system; a practice management software solution; some form of basic EMR software functionality; and the ability for computers on your network to connect externally via Internet, dial-up modem, or some other method. TALK THE TALK The ﬁrst thing to remember when pursuing an electronic lab result solution is where you fall in the food chain. Remember that you are the customer and your lab is the vendor. Vendors should assist you with improving your practice and, they should go to great lengths to make you happy. Some groups with close ties to afﬁliate hospitals handling their labs, or in areas with WWW.PHYSICIANSPRACTICE.COM limited laboratory options, may feel pressured (read: bullied) to concede to the alternative position where the vendor tells you the customer what they will and will not do. Don’t fall for it. Let’s look at the nuts and bolts. In the healthcare IT industry, you will hear the term “interfaces” used to describe the software/hardware system that allow one computer system to transmit data to another system. These systems can be single direction (data ﬂowing only one direction), or bidirectional (data ﬂowing in both directions). For instance, a single-direction interface might only send lab results from the lab’s system into your system after a patient shows up with a paper lab order in hand. But a bidirectional system might allow you to send lab orders from your computer system to the external lab via the interface, and the lab results would return to your computer system via that same interface. In healthcare IT, when you hear people talking about these interfaces, you undoubtedly will also hear the term “HL7” thrown about. You can safeguard yourself from this iconic piece of techno-babble by just remembering HL7 is simply the “language” in which interfaces talk to your computer system. You will hear magical things about HL7, its complexities, its faults, and its strengths … but unless you want to become a programmer, let it be sufﬁcient that you know that LabSystem X talks to LabSystem Y in messages formed in HL7. ASK QUESTIONS When you begin to talk about healthcare lab interfaces to IT people, depending on your facility size, and their expertise, you may get varying responses about cost estimates and vendor willingness to participate. To wade through those responses, ask your IT resource/ EMR software vendor the following: • What do I have? Does your current EMR software support receiving labs electronically? Regardless of interfaces, if your software doesn’t have a place to put the labs (in some software, this may be part of a separate lab module application), then you may need to purchase such a lab module, for your EMR application. • Who do you know? Does your EMR software have an existing relationship with the lab you are currently using? In many cases, if you are using a large, well-known lab service, your vendor may have already developed an interface to that lab vendor. If that’s the case, your EMR vendor may be able to simply pull the pre-written interface from their software library, and deploy it onto your system. • Can I see it? If a relationship between the lab and your EMR vendor already exists, ask for reference sites currently using the interface in their ofﬁces. Try to arrange a site visit, or at least a conference call, to a few of those sites to get a feel for how the system performs, what work ﬂows surround implementation of the system, what problems that facility experienced, and what type and volume of labs their facility is seeing on a daily basis. • What is the timeline? Ask your vendor their historical experience in turnaround once you agree to go forward. NOVEMBER 2008 | PHYSICIANS PRACTICE | 55 http://WWW.PHYSICIANSPRACTICE.COM

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Physician's Practice - November 2008

Physician's Practice - November 2008 Contents Death of Solo Practice Just a Myth Letters HSAy What? Noteworthy Finding Lost Revenue: The Search for Billing and Coding Gold Getting More: Our Annual Physician Compensation Survey ’Tis the Season to be Neutral Ask the Experts Evaluating Paperless Labs HR in a Box? The Guide Coding Third-Party Audits on the Rise Branding the Cash-Only Practice Intra-Office Tug-of-Wars Stickin‘ Up For Yourself Classifieds Advertiser Index

Physician's Practice - November 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.