EHR Benefits | EMR and HIPAA

The Rise Of mHealth And EHR Use, And The World Of Telehealth – Around Healthcare Scene

Written by: Katie

mHealth is on the rise, and it looks like usage of smart phones among physicians is following that same trend. A recent study shows that usage rose about nine percent in 2012, which shows that it is becoming more accepted in the medical world. It will be interesting to see if it increases even more this year (I have a feeling it might.)

Similar to the increase in doctors using smartphones, there has been a jump in EMR and HIE use as well. A survey from Accenture found that over 90 percent of doctors are using an EMR in either their practice or at a hospital, and over 50 percent are using an HIE. This increase was highest among doctors in the United States. Be sure to read more of the interesting facts this survey found about EMR and HIE use in the U.S., and around the world.

Even though 90 percent of doctors are using an EMR at one point or another, only about 55 percent have actually adopted an EHR into their practice. It can be nerve-racking trying to find the perfect EHR. If you are finding yourself at that crossroad, be sure to read these five tips from ADP AdvancedMD on how to have a successful EHR implementation.

Still, some of you may be hesitant to implement an EHR. You may ask, is it worth it? Does it takeaway from healthcare? There is debate from both sides, each with compelling arguments. John believes that technology is overall positive in any industry, and discusses his thoughts, and some of the challenges that faces the industry.

Telehealth and medicine is so huge, it can be hard to digest. Neil Versel recently attended the American Telemedicine Association’s annual conference in Austin, Texas, and saw just how huge this market was. Be sure to check out this video he created from his experience, and to perhaps get a better idea about the many types of telehealth. Similar to the increase in doctors using smartphones, there has been a jump in EMR and HIE use as well. A survey from Accenture found that over 90 percent of doctors are using an EMR in either their practice or at a hospital, and over 50 percent are using an HIE. This increase was highest among doctors in the United States. Be sure to read more of the interesting facts this survey found about EMR and HIE use in the U.S., and around the world.

With summer quickly approaching, it’s more important than ever to stay hydrated. But if you need a little reminder, be sure to look into the Jomi Band. It gives you warnings when you might be on the brink of dehydration, and makes it easy to keep track of how much water you’ve consumed in a day’s time.

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May 12, 2013 I Written By Katie

Katie Clark is originally from Colorado and currently lives in Utah with her husband and son. She writes primarily for Smart Phone Health Care, but contributes to several Health Care Scene blogs, including EMR Thoughts, EMR and EHR, and EMR and HIPAA. She enjoys learning about Health IT and mHealth, and finding ways to improve her own health along the way.

Tags:EHR EMR mHealth Telehealth

EHR Benefit – Eligibility for Pay-for-Performance

Written by: John Lynn

It’s time for the next installment in my series of posts looking at the long list of EHR benefits.

Eligibility for Pay-for-Performance
I think that this is a really scary topic for most doctors. It’s not that a doctor is afraid of being reimbursed for the way they perform. The problem with pay for performance (ACO if you prefer) is that we have no idea what that’s really going to look like. The unknown is scary and a real problem. A change as dramatic from fee for service to pay for performance is an enormous shift and we still have very little idea how that shift is going to happen.

However, as one person told me, “That train (the shift to pay for performance) has already left the station.” In fact, I was talking with the former CEO of a major EMR vendor and he suggested that the shift is going to happen a lot faster than most of us realize. If we assume that this shift is going to happen, then doctors and healthcare better be prepared.

I believe having an EMR will be the only way a clinic can participate in pay for performance.

I make this assertion, because how else are payers going to measure your performance if they don’t have the data on how you’re performing? I’ve never thought of this before, but the EMR could become the performance measurement tool for doctors. Trying to flintstone your performance in a paper world is just not going to happen. The data collected in an EMR (and possibly other software) is going to drive the performance metrics which will drive the payments.

Think about what that means to a clinic. If you don’t have an EMR, you will miss out on the pay for performance payments.

I imagine many that read this will discount the shift that’s going to happen. That’s a fair position to take, but one that I think will come back to bite you. If the shift in payments doesn’t happen, then you won’t have to worry. However, if the shift to pay for performance has left the station, then you’re going to be at a tremendous disadvantage.

Healthcare data is going to drive a lot of things in the future of healthcare. Pay for performance is one of those things. Physicians who don’t have that data available in an EMR or other electronic format are going to face stiff challenges.

EHR Benefit – Eliminate Staff

Written by: John Lynn

It’s time for the next installment in my series of posts looking at the long list of EHR benefits.

Eliminate Staff
The idea of eliminating staff is a really hard one to talk about. Often the staff in a medical office becomes a family and so it’s really hard to think about losing a staff member in order to pay for the EMR. In fact, it’s incredibly common for staff in a clinic to fear an EMR implementation because they’re afraid that their job is in jeopardy.

From my experience, it’s incredibly rare for any existing staff to lose their job during an EMR implementation.

There are two main reasons why it’s unlikely that someone will lose their job because of an EMR implementation. The first is that most healthcare organizations have a natural employee attrition. When this happens the organization can just choose to not replace the departing employee. This is one way to save money on staff without having to actually fire any employees.

The second reason that people don’t lose their job to the EMR is that those people get reassigned to new jobs. For some people this can be nearly as bad as losing a job, but for many it’s basically a shift in job responsibilities. This shift can often be welcome since the EMR implementation can free them up to do work that they always wanted to do and never were able to do before.

The areas of healthcare that I’ve seen most affected by an EMR implementation is medical records, transcription, billing, and the front desk. We’ve already written previously about transcription and EMR. The front desk and billing can be affected, but generally stays close to the same from what I’ve seen. A lot of this depends a lot on what type of staffing you had before the EMR. I have seen some organizations implement an EMR and save money on front desk and billing staff.

Medical records (or HIM if you prefer) is usually the most impacted. Certainly they still have an important place in the office for things like release of records and other records management functions. They also have to continue to deal with the legacy paper charts. However, their days of finding, organizing and filing charts are over when an EMR is put in place. In some cases the chart organizing and finding gets replaced with things like scanning into the EMR. In other cases, there isn’t as many medical records staff needed.

Many who are reading this post are probably balking at the idea of eliminating staff being a benefit of an EMR implementation. They’d no doubt point to the EHR backlash that we see from many doctors who complain that an EMR makes them much slower and takes up too much time. This is an important item to consider when evaluating the benefits of an EMR in your organization. It’s not much of a benefit to save other staff cost if the doctor spends twice as much time per patient.

However, on the other side of the coin is those doctors who swear by the efficiency their EMR provides them. I’ll never forget this older OB/GYN I met who told me he would NEVER use an EMR. Two years later that same OB/GYN was proclaiming his love of EMR. He described how he wouldn’t be able to see nearly as many patients as he did each day without the EMR. He acknowledged the slow down that occurred when they first implemented the EMR, but once they adapted to the EMR workflow they were able to see most patients.

No doubt Eliminating Staff can be a mixed EMR benefit basket depending on your unique situation. Although, this is true with almost every EMR benefit we’ll cover in this series. This can be a tremendous benefit of EMR or it can also be an expense as you find you need to hire more staff.

Related Whitepaper:
Getting Lean with Your Practice: Five Tips for Improving Provider Productivity with an EHR
One of the major reasons that health care providers resist implementing an electronic health record (EHR) system is the belief that using it will slow them down, reducing the number of patients they can see and therefore reducing practice revenue. In fact, an EHR that is designed around an efficient workflow can enable providers to work faster and more efficiently. “Lean” methodologies, originally introduced by Toyota, have recently been used by health care providers such as Massachusetts General Hospital, ThedaCare, and Beth Israel Hospital (Boston) to streamline patient workflow. By understanding and measuring the workflow, health care providers can determine best practices, which will ultimately enable them to achieve the level of efficiency they desire.

Download Whitepaper or see More EMR and Health IT Whitepapers

User-friendly EMRs, Meaningful Use Fraud, and DietBet – Around Healthcare Scene

Written by: Katie

Many are concerned with the user experience in Health IT – particularly regarding the user-friendliness of EMRs. While it is easy to be overwhelmed by the negative reports, there are businesses and providers working hard to resolve these issues. McKesson is one of those companies, and they were recently recognized for their work at HIMSS13. Will more companies start making efforts like this?

One step toward making EMRs more user-friendly is, well, making them accessible to patients. Unfortunately, according to a recent Accenture study, 65 percent of doctors believe patients should only have limited access to their health records, and 4 percent believe records should be totally closed. Reasons range from self-consciousness of what a doctor says in a record, to being uncomfortable with using digital records. Allowing patient-access may very well be a huge cultural shift for doctors everywhere.

In order to pass Meaningful Use stage 1, one must indicate which EMR was adopted. But, according to BuildYourEMR.com’s CEO, Mike Jensen, 74 percent of the providers who stated they were using his EMR…weren’t. If this is similar across the board, around 5.4 billion dollars were paid in error for incentives. While this isn’t likely to be the case, it’s pretty sad the lengths people will go to in order to get some extra money. EMR vendors need to start going over their CMS data in order to help prevent this fraudulent behavior.

If money was at stake for you to lose weight, would that motivate you? For most people, it probably would. DietBet takes the desire people have to lose weight and pairs it with the innate desire to have money, and creates a weight-loss game. If you lose 4 percent of your body weight in four weeks, you get part of the money pot for the group you are in. If you don’t, you lose the amount you paid to participate in the first place.

John recently had the opportunity to go to TEDMED as a guest of the Breakaway Group (A Xerox company)
. It was a great experience for him, and highlights can be found @ehrandhit or searching #simplehealth on Twitter. John recounts some of key takeaways from TEDMED, and suggests some of the major themes that will likely be seen in healthcare.

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April 21, 2013 I Written By Katie

Filed Under: EHR EHR Benefits EHR Stimulus Electronic Health Record Electronic Medical Record EMR EMR Consulting EMR Technology Healthcare Healthcare Devices Healthcare Social Media Hospitals Meaningful Use

Tags:BuildYourEMR.com DietBet mHealth MIke Jensen Health IT TedMed TEDMED 2013

Analytics-Driven Compassionate Healthcare at El Camino Hospital

Written by: Mandi Bishop

Given its location in the heart of Silicon Valley, it may not be remarkable that El Camino Hospital was the first hospital in the US to implement EMR. What IS remarkable is that El Camino implemented EMR 51 years ago, leveraging an IBM mainframe system that Lockheed Martin refactored for healthcare from its original intended use for the space program.

Take a moment to process that. El Camino didn’t need PPACA, Meaningful Use, HITECH, or HIPAA to tell them health data is critical. El Camino saw the value in investing in healthcare IT for electronic data capture and communication without federal incentive programs or lobbyists. With that kind of track record of visionary leadership, it’s no wonder they became early analytics program adopters, and recently turned to Health Care DataWorks (HCD) as a trusted partner.

When I sat down with executive leadership from El Camino and HCD to discuss the journey up Tom Davenport‘s analytics maturity scale from rudimentary operational reporting to advanced analytics, I expected a familiar story of cost pressure, clinical informatics, quality measure incentives or alternative payment models as the business drivers for new insights development. Instead, I heard the burgeoning plan for a visionary approach to patient engagement and “analytics-driven compassionate care”.

Greg Walton, CIO of El Camino Hospital, admitted that initial efforts to implement an analytics program had resulted in “textbook errors”: “’Competing on Analytics’ was easier to write than execute,” he said. Their early efforts to adopt and conform to a commercially-available data model were hindered by the complexity of the solution and the philosophy of the vendor. “One of the messages I would give to anybody is: do NOT attempt this at home,” Greg laughed, and El Camino decided to change their approach. They sought a “different type of company…a real-life company with applicable lessons learned in this space.”

“The most important thing to remember in this sector: you’re investing in PEOPLE. This is a PEOPLE business,” Greg said. “And that if there’s any aspect of IT that’s the most people-oriented, it’s analytics. You have to triangulate between how much can the organization absorb, and how fast they can absorb it.” In HCD, El Camino found an analytics organization partner whose leadership and resources understand healthcare challenges first, and technology second.

To address El Camino’s need for aggregated data access across multiple operational systems, HCD is implementing their pioneering KnowledgeEdge Enterprise Data Warehouse solution,including its enterprise data model, analytic dashboards, applications and reports. HCD’s technology, implementation process, and culture is rooted in their deep clinical and provider industry expertise.

“The people (at HCD) have all worked in hospitals, and many still work there occasionally. Laypersons do not have the same understanding; HCD’s exposure to the healthcare provider environment and their level of experience provides a differentiator,” Greg explained. HCD impressed with their willingness to roll up their sleeves and work with the hospital stakeholders to address macro and micro program issues, from driving the evaluation and prioritization of analytics projects to identifying the business rules defining discharge destination. And both the programmers and staff are “thrilled,” Greg says: “My programmers are so happy, they think they’ve died and gone to heaven!”

This collaborative approach to adopting analytics as a catalyst for organizational and cultural change has lit a fire to address the plight of the patient using data as a critical tool. Greg expounded upon his vision to achieve what Aggie Haslup, Vice President of Marketing for HCD, termed “analytics-driven compassionate care”:

We need to change the culture about data without losing, and in fact enhancing, our culture around compassion. People get into healthcare because they’re passionate about compassion. Data can help us be more compassionate. US Healthcare Satisfaction scores have been basically flat over the last 10 years. Lots of organizations have tried to adopt other service industry tools: LEAN,6S; none of those address the plight of the patient. We’ve got to learn that we have to go back to our roots of compassion. We need to get back to the patient, which means “one who suffers in pain.” We want (to use data) to help understand more about person who’s suffering. My (recent) revelation: what do you do w/ guests in your house? Clean the house, put away the pets, get food, do everything you can to make guests comfortable. We want to know more about patients’ ethnicity, cultural heritage, the CONTEXT of their lives because when you’re in pain, what do you fall back on? Cultural values. We want a holistic view of the patient, because we can provide better, compassionate care through knowing more about patients. We want to deploy a contextual longitudinal view of the patient…and detect trends in satisfaction with demographics, clinical, medical data.

What a concept. Imagine the possibilities when a progressive healthcare provider teams with an innovative analytics provider to harness the power of data to better serve the patient population. I will definitely keep my eye on this pairing!

NetPulse, HIEs, and The Importance of Reliable EMRs — Around Healthcare Scene

Written by: Katie

Have you ever wished that all your fitness and food trackers were in one place? Well, look no further. NetPulse is trying to do just that. The new platform is working with some of the hottest apps, as well as fitness equipment makers, to make taking control of your health easier and more convenient.

A group of researchers recently published an opinion in the Journal of the American Medical Association regarding cloud-based health records versus HIEs. The verdict? They feel that the cloud-based health records might be a better way of sharing health records. What they had to say was rather interesting, so don’t miss the recap of it over at EMR and EHR.

Still looking to use HIEs, rather than Cloud-based health records? The ONC has recently released a toolkit to help different healthcare professionals use them more efficiently. This toolkit includes several guides and a spreadsheet to help determine costs and savings that are associated with implementing an EHR.

For those that missed HIMSS, check out the video that John filmed of the Metro point of care solutions. It gives you a first person perspective of what you could have seen demoed at HIMSS if you were able to attend. Plus, it’s pretty cool to see the point of care and BCMA technologies in action.

It’s important for an EMR to be usable. However, this isn’t always the case, and it can be extremely frustrating. Dr. Shirie Leng, an anesthesiologist, is someone who feels that way. In a recent piece over at KevinMD.com, Dr. Leng discusses her EMR usability wish list. Be sure to check it out, and see if you agree. What is your usability wish list?

And, how smart is your current EMR? According to John, it might just be stupid. While they may have value, most EHR software is just full of dumb data repositories. Despite the negativity of this perspective, the future of EHRs does have hope. With the help of entrepreneurs innovators, current EHRs will be turned smart.

Finally, in order for EMRs to make the changes needed, to improve usability and become more “smart,” the vendors need to get it together. KLAS recently put several popular EMRs head-to-head, reviewing their usability and efficiency. Although names weren’t listed, they found that some EMRs were very difficult to learn, and it’s not necessarily the physician who is using its fault. Perhaps it’s time that physicians and hospitals demand higher quality products.

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March 24, 2013 I Written By Katie

Filed Under: EHR EHR Benefits Electronic Health Record Electronic Medical Record EMR Healthcare HealthCare IT HIE Hospital EHR Hospitals

Tags:Dr. Shirie Lang EHR EMR HIE Journal of the American Medical Association Usability

HIMSS Analytics Clinical & BI Maturity Model

Written by: Mandi Bishop

While the theme of HIMSS 2013 may have been, “How Great Is Interoperability,” the effectiveness of the many facets of interoperability are only as good as the actionable value of the shared data. The clinical insights that should be enabled by Meaningful Use Stage 2+ are expected to drive market trends in myriad areas of the healthcare system: chronic disease management, targeted member interventions, quality measures. In order to assess organizational readiness to capitalize on the promise of Meaningful Use, HIMSS Analytics began measuring the implementation and adoption of EMR and clinical documentation using a maturity model called EMRAM.

But, in analytics terms, EMRAM’s results are simply targeted foundational reporting, answering the question, “WHAT happened with Meaningful Use EMR adoption criteria.” So, you’ve got your clinical data in an EMR. Now what are you able to DO with it?

In 2013, HIMSS Analytics is taking a broader approach with the introduction of a new Clinical Business Intelligence maturity model, creating a framework to benchmark participating providers’ analytics maturity level.

I’ve been fortunate to know James Gaston, Senior Director of HIMSS Analytics Clinical & Business Intelligence, for many years, going back to his days with Arkansas Blue Cross. His appreciation for BI initiatives is matched only by his enthusiasm for the first day of turkey hunting season. When I ran into him at TDWI’s BI World summit in Orlando in November, he acted like a kid on Christmas morning, telling me about the brave new world of clinical data management that he was about to tackle. The excitement continued to build in the months leading up to HIMSS. James was practically glowing when we spoke about the upcoming C&BI Maturity Model release.

“Our customers are interested in not just understanding how to deploy IT applications, but how effectively they’re using those applications to support clinical business intelligence, as well as analytical pursuits,” James said. “So, HIMSS Analytics partnered with IIA to create and present a Clinical & BI Maturity Model that helps healthcare organizations measure that level of effectiveness.”

Sarah Gates, the VP of Research for IIA (the International Institute of Analytics), elaborated. “The HIMSS Analytics C&BI Maturity Model leverages the Competing on Analytics DELTA model, developed by Tom Davenport, which measures not only how well you’re using data and technology, but how well you’re building an analytical organization.” There are 5 core competency measurements in the DELTA model that will inform the HIMSS Analytics C&BI analysis: Data, Enterprise, Leadership, Targets, and Analysts. The methodology is holistic, touching on the cultural aspects of the organization as well as the technical, allowing a longitudinal view of the organization’s analytics program. A yardstick value from 1-5 will be assigned to each respondent based on Davenport’s criteria for each core competency.

Although HIMSS Analytics will eventually offer Level 1-5 certification program for those organizations with observed results for analytics, James and Sarah agreed that it is not appropriate for every provider to reach for the Level 5 gold star. Per Sarah, “Healthcare is an industry just starting to discover analytics. We’re expecting to see lots of practitioners that are emerging in use of analytics, so we believe it (survey results) will be heavy on the lower end of the maturity scale. Data warehouse capabilities and staffing career paths for data analysts will be key differentiators for mature programs.” Not all providers have the resources – financial, human, and/or technical – to attain advanced analytics nirvana, and James wants to insure that these providers don’t feel as if they’ve “failed”; the goal is to baseline against the peer group, identify opportunities for improvement, and focus on what is possible for each individual organization, working within their constraints.

What can we expect to see at next year’s C&BI survey results presentation? James said, “We want to be able to talk about benchmarking the industry as a whole, helping healthcare find its way with clinical business intelligence and begin to understand how important it is, and where opportunities lie Everyone’s talking about clinical and BI – it is the opportunity to realize savings in healthcare, to use information to empower people to make better decisions.”

So, it’s up to you, providers and technology partners. You’ve implemented your EMR, achieved a high adoption rate across your organization’s core clinical processes, attested to Meaningful Use Stage 2, achieved Stage 7 on the HIMSS EMRAM scale, perhaps even participated in multi-HIE CCD medical records sharing with other provider networks. You’ve got the data in-house and availabe. It’s time to see how ready you are to rise to the analytics challenge and maximize your return on those EMR and HIE investments.

Attempt to beat your previous Doug Fridsma long jump.

Note: for the complete HIMSS 2013 Leadership Survey Results, please download PDF here.

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March 14, 2013 I Written By Mandi Bishop

Tags:Advanced Analytics Clinical Analytics EHR Analytics EHR Interoperability HIMSS Analytics ONC ONCHIT

The Marvelous Land of Oz: The HIMSS Interoperability Showcase

Written by: Mandi Bishop

As I walked the floor of the HIMSS Interoperability Showcase, listening to the tour guide’s carnie-esque pitch on the wonders awaiting me with each successive use case encounter, I ALMOST wished I hadn’t worked with so many of the organizations hawking their wares. It’s a bit sad to know the man behind the curtain, to realize that The Great and Powerful Oz is simply a man with a highly mechanized presentation. But that knowledge gives me insight that others attending the Showcase may not have had – and validation that, in the end, Oz IS Great and Powerful, even though he’s just a man.

There were 20 specific interoperability use cases represented at HIMSS this year, collectively, by 101 vendors. In order to qualify to participate, each of the organizations had to successfully demonstrate proficiency with their chosen use case at the Connectathon event in Chicago. In January. In a basement the size of a football field. Packed shoulder-to-shoulder with your closest competitors at high school-cafeteria tables. Talk about a frigid atmosphere!

Perhaps to stay warm, perhaps to pass the time, perhaps in the pursuit of the patient-centric design principles the healthcare industry espouses publicly yet so seldom seems to put into practice, cross-company collaboration occurs. Competitors converge on each others’ laptops, debugging code, refining business rules and algorithms. Functional use cases emerge, success stories are shared, everyone goes home happy with a list of enhancements to incorporate before the main event at HIMSS. The frantic rush to prep for Connectathon is amplified by the urgency and importance of HIMSS. The ONC is watching! Your competitors are watching! The 40K HIMSS attendees will be watching!

Invariably, the use cases are perfected in the weeks leading up to HIMSS, each click carefully orchestrated, each transition scripted, all parties putting forth their best effort to insure success for the spectators – many of whom are clients, prospects, regulatory officials, or journalists seeking The Next Big Healthcare Thing to go viral in the blogosphere. The yellow brick road is constructed, and as one walks its length, the carefully choreographed demonstrations come to life with compelling tales: “Keeping a Newborn Safe,” “Improving Pediatric Care,” “Optimizing Cancer Care,” “Beneficiary Enrollment.” The show goes on, and it’s a good one – albeit with the occasional glimpse of the man behind the curtain.

The perfectly nice gentleman manning the Federal Health Architecture booth seemed eager to demonstrate the capability to request and retrieve a patient’s medical record from multiple HIEs and disparate EMRs. He walked me through the provider portal view, showed me how he could see that there were multiple medical records available for this patient across providers, and talked me through each click up until the print button. Print?

“Aren’t you importing the records into the requesting EMR?” I asked.

“No. Right now, they have to print each set of records.”

“So, each time this scenario presents itself, the provider has to click on each available external record, print multiple pages, compare notes across screen and paper, and later choose whether to manually update his own EMR with the other information?”

The perfectly nice gentleman suddenly seemed uncomfortable. The Great and Powerful Oz, exposed as mere mortal, Oscar Zoroaster Diggs. You’d think I’d know when to quit.

“The standards and technology exist to do CCD discrete data import, and a couple of the large EMR vendors are implementing that capability for high Medicare population IDNs. How does it make the provider more efficient, and give the patient more face-time with his doctor, if we’re still printing and no data consolidation or reconciliation is happening prior to point-of-care? Why didn’t you extend the use case to show end state?”

He assured me that they’re working on it, and we made a deal that NEXT year, I’ll come back and he’ll walk me through their progress towards discrete data import. No printing, he promised. I’m going to hold him to it.

Aside from this specific use case, across the Marvelous Land of Oz, what I’d REALLY love to see next year: the basement Connectathon advancements made to support the use cases for HIMSS actually incorporated into the products. As part of the qualifying criteria for repeat showcase exhibitors, have them demonstrate the capabilities developed in prior years actually functioning in the marketplace under general release. That would be a substantial improvement on this year’s long jump attempt for the Interoperability Showcase.

I want to fall in love with the hard-working man behind the curtain, not the showy pyrotechnics.

EMR Companies, Leveling the Playing Field, and The Eatery: Around Healthcare Scene

Written by: Katie

EMR and EHR

What Really Differentiates EHR Companies?

EHR companies are a dime-a-dozen. So what makes them different? While price is sometimes a big deal to some, it isn’t an indicator of success. Marketing and sales can make a difference as well to some. However, there are a few things that should differentiate EHR companies. This includes the importance of efficiency.

Android’s Advantage Over iPhone in Mobile Health Applications

While many in the healthcare world love the iPhone, Android devices may present more options to healthcare professionals. Android offers more customization than the iPhone, and has more flexibility. It may cause developers more headaches, as the iPhone only requires them to only code their application once to work with most iOS devices. But the benefits are countless.

Hospital EMR and EHR

Level the Playing Field with RACs as They Enter Practice Settings

This article is by Lori Brocato, Director of Audit at HealthPort. She lists four ways that hospitals can do to level the playing field with RACs. These reasons are: knowledge is power, it’s a team effort, connect the dots, and learn from mistakes.

How EMR Vendors and Providers Can Partner Effectively

The LinkedIn HIMSS group posed the question — what does a good partnership between an EMR vendor and a provider look like? This post includes a few of Anne Zieger’s thoughts on this question.

Smart Phone Healthcare

The Eatery: A Visual Food Diary

The Eatery puts a twist on the typical food diary — instead of recording food, you take a picture. The user then can rate their food, and others can too.

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February 10, 2013 I Written By Katie

Filed Under: EHR EHR Benefits Electronic Health Record Electronic Medical Record EMR EMR Consulting EMR Selection mHealth

Tags:EHR EMR EMR Vendors RAC RACs The Eatery

EHR Benefit – Space Savings

Written by: John Lynn

It’s time for the next installment in my series of posts looking at the long list of EHR benefits.

Space Savings
I’ve heard many clinics use the space savings as a great way to justify the cost of their EHR. This works better in the small physician office market than it does in the hospital market, but the principles are similar. However, the scale is different.

The obvious space savings is the storage of all the paper charts. While many clinics are quite creative in how they’ve stored paper charts (see the walls around the front desk of many clinics), the most common storage is a chart room dedicated to the storage of all the paper charts. Each state has its own requirements for the retention of paper charts, but its usually somewhere in the neighborhood of 6 years. 6 years of paper charts amounts to a lot of storage space. Plus, many doctors I know keep their paper charts well beyond the required retention period (the liability of doing so is a different discussion).

There are many different approaches to dealing with your paper charts during an EHR implementation. Many continue referencing and pulling the paper chart, but just start any future documentation in the EHR. Others scan the patient charts for the following day’s appointments. Others choose to only scan parts of the paper chart similar to how they use to “thin” the paper charts. In each of these situations, the space savings will start to accrue over time, but you won’t experience a big space opening up right away.

One way that some clinics gain space is by moving the charts from a very accessible place to one less accessible. As you move to EMR, there isn’t as much of a need to access the old paper charts and so you can often optimize your space in a way to free up the previous paper chart storage space and move the paper charts to a different space in your office.

Another option many clinics are doing is outsourcing the scanning of all their old paper charts to an outside company. While not the topic of this post, the cost and quality of such outsourced scanning has made it a really attractive option for many clinics. Many chart scanning companies will even do clinical data abstraction as I’ve written about before. In this case, all of your paper charts get scanned into digital form and you no longer have any paper charts storage needed at your office. It’s always amazing to see an entire room full of paper charts sitting on a little hard drive.

I’ve heard of clinics use the previous chart storage space in a variety of ways. The most interesting is when the previous chart storage space is turned into an exam room(s). This extra exam room can allow a clinic to see more patients or even hire another provider who sees patients in their clinic. In this current fee for service environment, that translates directly to dollar signs for the clinic. If you can achieve this during your EHR implementation, it’s a great way to justify the cost of the EHR and is a tremendous financial benefit to consider.

In other cases, the chart room is turned into an office for the billing staff, practice manager, nurses, or doctor. Doing so can’t easily translate to a specific dollar amount, but can also lead to valuable benefits such as employee satisfaction, quality of care, quality of billing, etc.

Saving space isn’t always a result of implementing an EHR, but it can be in many EHR implementations. So, consider how the chart storage space can benefit your clinic.

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The Rise Of mHealth And EHR Use, And The World Of Telehealth – Around Healthcare Scene

EHR Benefit – Eligibility for Pay-for-Performance

EHR Benefit – Eliminate Staff

Analytics-Driven Compassionate Healthcare at El Camino Hospital

NetPulse, HIEs, and The Importance of Reliable EMRs — Around Healthcare Scene

HIMSS Analytics Clinical & BI Maturity Model

The Marvelous Land of Oz: The HIMSS Interoperability Showcase

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