EHR Odds & Ends

The blog lives!! It has been on a temporary sabbatical but is back in time to prepare you for our next upgrade. You all remember our Go-Live date is 8/18/14, a mere month away.

Next week I plan to have lunch in the conference room each day & ask you to join, when you can, for your first look at the new KBM. I will try to do this in SHO on wednesday if Annette can set me up.

Annette will be setting up some evenings over the next month for Kathy to show you the upgrade in more detail. She will do this by Webinar, but will be with us in person for the upgrade.

Other EHR news includes:

I have been working with Kathy Tremble on using Provider Test Action to update providers on their complex patients. She has started to do this for me & can do it for you too if you are interested. She is learning how to update chronic conditions & the medication list. She is trying to add the names of the subspecialists to the chronic conditions so it shows up easily in the summary screen. In the upgrade there is a Case Management Template that she can use for these complex patients. She will plan to update the patient's record before their appointment. You will then be able to cut & paste any information you wish to throw into your note.

I am training Mary O. to put the birth history into the EHR before the babies arrive for their 4 day check. So far this has been a hit with the staff & Mary enjoys it. Please try to make your newborn rounding sheets as complete as possible because it really shortens the amount of time she has to spend trying to recover the info.

I have shown Sandie Martin how to do Tasks in the EHR & how to use the Provider Test Action. Betsy's committee is still working out the details on how we will address normal & abnormal labs as a group, but once that is finalized I will help train whichever staff will be involved.

Patti & Scott have been working on improving the saved " Quick Visit" physicals so it reflects more of what the majority of providers want. I believe there is a document, with the new suggestions for how the visits should look, being drawn up & should go to the partners soon. I hope I will be able to get these visits into the computer in time for the upgrade.

Adair & myself have started to work on Nextpen. We have a training coming up. I think this will save the staff a lot of time in collecting social Hx, Family Hx, etc from the patients. We will see.

Some of us have started to look at Portal. We have the Portal but just have to turn it on. We will not do this til we have procedures in place to address anything that comes in over the portal. We think we will let families use the Portal to access billing first. We would like to get to sending lab results thru the Portal soon after that. Annette will set up a training to start this process.

There are now 2 front desk staff taking pictures of patients when they arrive for WCC. This seems to be going smoothly. We need to set up something in SHO & I will work with Annette on moving this forward once she is back from vacation.

Check out is still a work in progress. The staff are doing well with this but many patients are not stopping at check out & a number of providers are not doing plans in time for them to get anything at check out. I hope we can work on this. Patient plans may be one of the few really meaningful things in Meaningful Use. I have started to give my patients the purple chart with the billing slip & ask them to take it to check out. Most of them have stopped because they think they are carrying something of importance to the check out staff. Once there, I have asked the check out staff to give them the plan. I will let you know how this works.

Please remember for meaningful use stage 2 money we must be giving patient plans to a certain % of our patients. If you have fallen off the Check Out wagon, I hope you will consider jumping back on.

More to come...