If you don\’t know by now, I am an EMR evangelist. A poorly implemented EMR is a nightmare – slowing people down and increasing frustration. A well-implemented product, however, will give a huge improvement to workflow in the office, benefitting both doctor and patient.
Here is our EMR in action (with HIPAA censorship present). I am checking labs on a patient and evaluate their lipids using a Framingham risk calculator that takes the variables from the patient data. I then generate an email and send it to the patient. The whole process takes me about a minute (under 30 seconds if I am not recording). The patients get an email stating that there are results waiting on our server and have to log on securely to view them. We are notified when they view them and if they haven\’t viewed them after 30 days (or whatever interval we determine).
The quick jumps between screens are macros we put on our computers using free software.
Enjoy.
My product is Centricity by GE, but the point is not to push their product, it is simply to show what is possible (and what I do every day with my EMR).
If you want more good information on choosing and EMR or making your current one work better, visit my EMR page.
Excellent. No fuss, no muss, no bad handwriting or screwed up transcription.
Sadly, Rob, many of your colleagues still insist that moving to EMR/EHR/PHR technology will slow them down, that forcing them to record notes in this systematic fashion will somehow cause them to forget to record something vital to the patient, that the data will be formatted in a way that causes them to miss something vital on a review, that the data will go to the wrong place (Farmville?), that they’ll for get how to take notes and then a thunderstorm will destroy the computers and they’ll be screwed because they can’t find any paper. I swear, sometimes I think the status quo is a retrovirus.
Thanks for posting this, Rob. It will be nice having a something to show to the Luddites.
I would have recognized that EMR even if you hadn’t called it by name; it’s the same one I stare at every day. I don’t get to see all of it’s functionality just by the specificity of my job description, but sometimes I realize that even for all the wonderful things that an EMR can do, there are human limitations that a computerized record can’t overcome. It is, however, far superior to spending my days trying to decipher atrocious handwriting. (And no, I’m not just talking about physicians, here, either; some of the worst handwriting I ever saw came from other people who entered stuff into traditional paper records, like technicians and nurses. ) The downside is that we have nothing we can do if the electricity goes down for some reason; there isn’t a fiber of paper to be found except for the blasted EKG printouts, which I hate with a passion because providers always forget to scan them into the record and we’re stuck asking them to do so (can’t bill out a procedure if we don’t have proof they actually did it, after all…). On a completely different note, I wish my doctor’s office would do that e-mail for labs thing; that would be awesome from a patient perspective. Unfortunately I think a lot of them are still stuck in those Luddite 1950s in that regard.
Looks heavenly to me. I just called my doctor’s office to ask for my most recent lab results.
“We’ll have to get permission from the doctor before you can look at them”….sigh…