New EHR technology 'huge satisfier' for caregivers
New EHR technology 'huge satisfier' for caregivers
Past documents 'easily accessible'
Physicians "will never have to come to the health information management [HIM] department again" with the implementation of new electronic health record technology at St. Francis Health Center in Topeka, KA, says Judy Hintzman, the facility's director of HIM.
"We laugh and tell them they may want to drop by," she adds, "but they won't have to."
Physicians will have the ability to access reports in their offices, Hintzman notes, including those from weekend patient visits to the emergency department. Patients usually go to their physician's office the week after such a trip to the ED, and typically the report will not have made it there yet, she says. "Now all scanning will occur within 24 hours, so they can pull up the report."
The biggest impact of the technology on patient access staff, Hintzman says, will be the easy availability of information gathered from patients in the past.
"There will be a specific section for advance directives and patient history and it will be right on their desktop," she says. "If the person is a previous patient, [patient access staff] always have trouble locating [documents] brought in the past. Now they will be easily accessible for those who are verifying the information."
Data that may be needed for preadmission testing, including information on medications, "will all be on the desktop and labeled," Hintzman adds.
The EHR software a product of eWebHealth, the technology division of ChartOne Inc. is "very intuitive" and user-friendly, she says. "When you bring it up on the screen, it looks like anything else you would be working in, for example, Microsoft. If you have used [software] like that before, you will be able to go ahead and use this."
Prompts are easy to follow and, because the software is customized, all in terms already used at St. Francis, Hintzman says. "Every facility has a zillion forms and we all call them something different. The names of our forms, our labels are used in the system. There are no 'canned' names."
The new process brings all those elements together, she adds. They are either imported automatically from another system or are scanned in, Hintzman explains.
Radiology reports, for example, are automatically imported, Hintzman says. "Our options in the past were either to pull a hard copy record from HIM or go in to the individual systems to find what was needed."
The software "facilitates all of the record completion processes," she adds. "Once you have everything and it's in the system, there is still processing to do making sure everything is there as part of the analysis. [The system] goes through and identifies the elements required and then checks for their presence.
"For example, a post-anesthesia note to the physician is required," Hintzman notes. "It will be there or not. If it's there, we don't have to worry. If not, it will [alert the user]. Physicians have a queue with incomplete records and deficiencies listed for them."
In addition, documents that routine users want to see are loaded into the system, she says. When coders, who have to look at physician dictation, sign into the system, Hintzman explains, it is programmed to show them the appropriate documents.
Quality of care, she notes, "was our main reason for going with this [system]. Having information available to caregivers is a huge satisfier for caregivers and patients."
Physicians "will never have to come to the health information management [HIM] department again" with the implementation of new electronic health record technology at St. Francis Health Center in Topeka, KA, says Judy Hintzman, the facility's director of HIM.Subscribe Now for Access
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