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HIT: PART TWO

By Shahid Shah MS

Wowsa!

What a year [2013] in the HIT business?

Because of all the talk about EMRs and medical records software you’ll have many reasons to start immediately looking for an EMR vendor.

Try to resist that urge and look at broader non-EMR solutions that can help remove some of the non-clinical burdens from your staff in 2014:

• Fax Server – a fax server allows you to centrally manage all incoming and outgoing faxes. Since most medical practices live on fax, this is one of the fastest investments you can recoup.
• Shared drives – start using shared drives either using your existing software or you can purchase inexpensive “network disks” for a few hundred dollars to share business forms, online directories, reports, scanned charts, and many other files.
• Online backups and Internet PACS storage – there are online tools like JungleDisk.com that allow you to store gigabytes of encrypted data into the Internet “cloud” for just a few dollars a month.
• E-mail (beware of HIPAA, though) – internal office messaging and email is a great place to start. If you haven’t started your office automation journey here you should. If you’re going to use it for patient communications you’ll need to make sure you have patient approvals and appropriate encryption. If you’re on Gmail today and you want to have customers immediately be able to communicate with you on Gmail, that’s generally HIPAA compliant because communications between two Gmail accounts stays within the Google data center and is not sent unencrypted over the Internet.
• E-Prescribing – e-prescribing is a great place to start your automation journey because it’s a fast way to realize how much slower the digital process is in capturing clinical data. If e-prescribing alone makes you slower in your job, EMRs will likely affect you even more. If you’re productive with e-prescribing then EMRs in general will make you more productive too.
• Office Online and Google Apps (scheduling, document sharing) – Google and Microsoft® have some very nice online tools for managing contacts (your patients are contacts), scheduling (appointments), dirt simple document management, and getting everyone in the office “on the same page”. Before you jump into full-fledged EMRs see if these basic free tools can do the job for you.
• Modular clinical groupware – this is a new category of software that allows you to collaborate with colleagues on your most time-consuming or most-needy patients and leave the remainder of them as-is. By automating what’s taking the most of your time you don’t worry about the majority of patients who aren’t.
• Patient registry and CCR bulletin boards – if you’re just looking for basic patient population management and not detailed office automation then patient registries and CCR databases are a great start. These don’t help with workflow but they do manage patient summaries.
• Document imaging – scanning and storing your paper documents is something that affects everyone; all scanners come with some basic imaging software that you can use for free. Once you’re good at scanning and paper digitization you can move to “medical grade” document managements that can improve productivity even more.
• Clinical content repository (CMS) – open source systems like DrupalModules.com and Joomla.org do a great job of content management and they can be adapted to do clinical content management.
• Electronic lab reporting – if labs are taking up most of your time, you can automate that pretty easily with web-based lab reporting systems.
• Electronic transcription – if clinical note taking is taking most of your time, you can automate that by using electronic transcribing.
• Speech recognition – another “point solution” to helping with capturing clinical notes; you can get a system up and running for under $250.
• Instant Messaging (IM) – IM gives you the ability to connect directly with multiple rooms within your office using free software; if you want, you can also connect with patients and other physicians during work hours.

Assessment

Can you think of any others?

Part One: Before you Jump to a Full-Fledged EMR Check out Other Options [Part 1]

Conclusion

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Filed under: iMBA, Inc., Information Technology | Tagged: EHRs, EMRs, Shahid N. Shah |