Physicians Practice - Tech Guide 2008 - (Page 22)

OPERATIONS NEEDLE IN A HAYSTACK The real problem with paper is that it takes up a lot of room and is never where you want it when you want it. It’s hardly surprising that you can’t ﬁnd the one ﬁle you need in a room that houses more than 1,000 square feet of patient charts. All it takes is one busy employee to misﬁle a chart, and then, poof; it’s as if that ﬁle never existed. practices. At Nassau Orthopedic Surgeons on Long Island, Bonini employed 14 front-desk staffers before the ofﬁce converted to an EMR in 2000. Six months later, that number was down to nine — a 36 percent reduction. Bonini realized that the practice had been paying the equivalent of three full-time employees just to look for and move around paper charts. Viewed from that angle, digitizing patient charts is just one component of enhancing your ofﬁce’s efﬁciency. Moore recommends that practices map out their entire work ﬂow — literally. She’s helped practices do just that on index cards. Start with patient check-in: Where does the patient go, and which employees help that patient? What are the next steps? “Understand what needs to happen, then you can look at how technology can help you make that better,” says Moore. UNCHARTED TERRITORY WHATEVER IT TAKES “If you could run an office efficiently and lucratively using clamshells or chocolate bars, I don’t care.” Pamela Moore, Physicians Practice So it follows that since the general purpose of an EMR is to transfer your paper medical charts into an electronic format, most practices think going paperless will solve all of their problems. There’s no doubt that the ease of accessing thousands of charts at the touch of a button can have a tremendous impact on your practice’s productivity. An EMR puts an end not only to searching for misﬁled charts, but also to marching from front desk to ﬁle room, walking back again to use the photocopy machine, and shufﬂing ﬁles between physician ofﬁces and the front desk — not to mention the enormous amount of time spent reﬁling charts that are pulled throughout the day. “The biggest waste of human resources that people have in their offices is filing,” says John Bonini, a practice manager who has overseen EMR conversions at two orthopedic 22 | PHYSICIANS PRACTICE | TECHNOLOGY GUIDE “Nobody’s job is called ‘Go look for things all day,’” says Bonini. “But if you add up the number of people who you have doing that all day long in a paper system, that’s about what you’ve got.” An EMR can free your employees from those types of demands, but what about all the other pieces of paper in your practice? What about the paper that never gets ﬁled in a chart at all — or the paper that needs to be filed, but its still waiting around? Most experts recommend focusing on your practice’s work ﬂow rather than just dumping all your ofﬁce’s paper when you go electronic. Paper isn’t necessarily the enemy; waste is. “Your objective is not to get rid of paper, but to make your work ﬂow at your practice more efﬁcient so that you can get a return on that technology investment,” says Moore. If you engage in the exercise Moore recommends, you’ll quickly ﬁnd that most of the paper your ofﬁce regularly handles isn’t even contained in patient charts. Consider all the different ways information arrives at your practice. Most outsourced ancillary service reports come in via fax. That includes lab results and consulting reports, not to mention EOBs and the vast amount of communication you regularly receive from insurers. In time, all those things may end up in patient charts, but someone still has to carry those pieces of paper to the appropriate charts and ﬁle them. If your charts are electronic, you’ll have to ﬁgure out how to get those pieces of paper into digital form — and who will do it. It’s not as difﬁcult as it sounds, but it does take some planning. Simply implementing an EMR doesn’t guarantee that your practice is ready to use it. You need to ensure that your EMR has a compatible scanning module that allows you to scan documents directly into patient charts in a way that allows you to easily index them. If physicians have to search through 60 pages of scanned documents to ﬁnd the one they need, they’re wasting their time. The point of digitizing patient records is to make your practice more efﬁcient — not less. Most practices will also want a scanning module that allows them WWW.PHYSICIANSPRACTICE.COM http://WWW.PHYSICIANSPRACTICE.COM

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

Physicians Practice - Tech Guide 2008 TG Cover Story: Protect Your Practice and Sleep Better Operations: Paperless? Not Quite The Internet: You've Got Mail...Or Do You? Patient Relations: Attention Grabbers The Tech Doctor: All About Blogs Lessons Learned: 'My EMR Nightmare...And Why I'd Do It Again' Scheduling: No More No-Shows The Marketplace: Who's Got Your Back IT Enhancement: Time, at Last, for an Upgrade? Online: 'Yup, I'm a Junkie. And Proud of It.' In the Office: New Technologies in the Workplace: Blessing or Curse? Web Surfing: If You Build It...

Physicians Practice - Tech Guide 2008

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