Thursday, May 29, 2014

EHR Manners. Improving the Provider-Patient Interaction

Here is a Medscape article addressing a common concern with EHRs, inferior patient interaction.
The article has a few tips on trying to incorporate the EHR into the visit in a way that includes the patient. I often use the EHR to show families the growth curves of their children. This allows me to turn the computer around & let patients/families experience the EHR.


http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/809237_print

Tuesday, May 27, 2014

How to Set Up a Default RX Printer in the Medication Module

You can now save the Rx (blue paper) printer in the medication module. You no longer have to press preview & then go to the printer selection up in the upper left hand corner to get the Rx printer.

To set the Rx printer as your favorite, start by going to Tools & then Preferences on the upper navigation bar.


































From Preferences select Medication Tab




















On the Medication Tab you will see a Printing & Faxing drop down menu. Pick the printer you wish to be your default. Since we ERx most of our scripts, this should probably be the blue paper printer at your station. Press Apply then OK.

Now when you choose to print a script, you just need to press the Print button in the Medication Module.


















If you wish to use a different Printer than the default printer, you can press the  (...) button next to the Printer path & you will get a drop down menu again to choose from. This will not change your default printer but will just print that one script on a different printer.

Setting this preference up does not change your printer for documents, only for scripts.

Thursday, May 22, 2014

Update on Possible Meaningful Use Changes Proposed by CMS

CMS Proposes to Let Docs Use Older EHRs in Incentive Program

Robert Lowes
May 20, 2014
 
In another victory for organized medicine, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) proposed today to let physicians in its "meaningful use" incentive program for electronic health record (EHR) systems use Stage 1 technology to satisfy Stage 2 requirements in 2014.

The proposal also would allow some physicians to achieve Stage 2 meaningful use in 2014 using Stage 1 objectives and measures for patient care.

What does this mean? Read full article.

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/825469?src=wnl_edit_tpal&uac=137896DK

The upgrade to 5.8 and, later this summer to 8.3, is to make our EHR 2014 compliant. " Organized Medicine" seems to be a day or 2 behind our upgrade schedule!

Monday, May 19, 2014

External Resources for Patient Education

Welcome to 5.8!! Let us all keep our fingers crossed. We hope today will go smoothly.

There are a number of cool things that I want to show you all, but for today I want to share with you new options for Patient Education.

Healthwise is still available & can be saved to the patient visit. The Check Out staff should be able to see it in the right navigation bar & therefore be able to hand it to the patient. Annette & I will make sure we train the staff to look for it. Until that is fully implemented you may want to tell your patients to ask for it at Check Out. Once we go to Portal you can send the Healthwise information to the Portal - more on this later.

We have also added Healthykids as an education source. To find it you must look in the problems module. There are 2 ways to get to this module. One is using the right hand navigation bar and it is in the lower Tic-Tac-Toe boxes under Dx. The other way is to use the new Patient Information Bar at the top of the visit. If you click into the number after the word problems it will open the module.



































From here you can see 2 tabs - Problem List & Billing ICD list. If you have given the patient a Dx in the assesment/plan section of the SOAP note, you will see it under the  Billing Tab. If not, you can add a problem ( see the button in the left lower corner) from here to the problem list. Either way, from the Problem list or the Billing List, you can see a tab with a blue circle called Resources :



























If you click on the Resources button you get a drop down. Internal Patient Education takes you to Healthwise, from here Heathwise will suggest Patient Education that is close to the Dx you have selected. You can pick from the options presented or search for something else.

You can also pick External Patient ( or Provider) References and it will take you to the Healthykids website where you can find the info you want and right click to print. This information does not save to the encounter but you could say you gave the information in your note if you wanted to.


















The same thing exists in the Medication Module, but the External Resource is Epocrates. Once you click into the website you go to "Epocrates on-line" to search. There is Patient Information on medications here if you wish to give more than the monograph. If you are not registered with Epocrates you may have limited use of this site.

Tell me how it works for you.

Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Getting Ready for 5-8

If you still have a pin to log into Nextgen it will be going away on Monday. If you can fix it before then it may save you a headache. Annette has given all pin users a dummy password of "nextgen".
You can sign in using your user name & this password.

Once you are in you should go to EPM & under tasks go to change password. Once there you can pick a new password. Next time you login you will use this new password.






















Another thing I learned today:
   
If it takes forever for your patient appointments & tasks to load it is probably due to your email being attached to this box. If you drop your email off of this square everything will load faster.


















If you right click into the upper left hand corner of the workflow box you can reconfigure the box to only have your schedule & your tasks. The email is still available in the left lower corner , as always.

Hope this is helpful. See you Thursday at the Provider meeting.