Matt Cady, Chief Innovation Officer at Florida’s Adult Medicine of Lake County, says that before his practice began using eClinicalWorks to track patients moving among care settings, they had a system in place: Post-It® Notes and spreadsheets.

In other words, in spite of having the cloud-based eClinicalWorks EHR, when it came to keeping track of patients moving from a hospital setting to home, they were still, in effect, using paper records. Each provider knew what was going on with their patients, but communicating that information to colleagues was cumbersome and time-consuming.

In 1968, Dr. Joel J. Nobel, a surgeon at Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Hospital, warned administrators that a hospital defibrillator wasn’t working. That same week, a 4-year-old patient died because of the same device.

When Florida medical practices talk about snowbirds, they aren’t talking ornithology. They are referring to the large subset of patients who spend the winter in the Sunshine State and scoot back North in the spring. Such patients pose one of the thorniest problems in medicine because keeping track of their health — from the specialists they have seen to whatever medications they are taking — can be a real challenge.

What kind of medical practices need an advanced tool for determining patient risk, projecting the likelihood of adverse health events, and processing each patient with the highest possible degree of specificity in coding for reimbursements?

Maximizing their clinical effectiveness while holding down costs is never easy, but for today’s medical practices, one sure guide is to follow the spending. And the evidence points overwhelmingly to one area — chronic medical conditions. 

How training can improve EHR satisfaction

One of the most familiar stories in healthcare IT is chronic dissatisfaction with Electronic Health Records (EHR). Study after study shows more than half of practices aren’t completely happy with their current EHR, although a much smaller number are actively seeking a new system at any given time.

It requires a great product and great training

Beginning in the early 1980s, a transformation of American medicine began that few medical professionals foresaw. And it wasn’t a miracle drug, a research breakthrough, or some dreaded new disease that did it. It was, to put it simply, the computer.

In 1841, 26-year-old Dr. Crawford Williamson Long inhaled nitrous oxide (yes, laughing gas) at a party and noticed something funny. Dr. Long noticed that even if you tripped and fell - instead of screaming in pain, you'd keep on laughing.

Healthcare has tremendous power to do good, but its very complexity can also bring complications. Nowhere is that clearer than when patients are moving from one care setting to another.

Dr. Martha R. Rodriguez used to have nightmares. Except she had them during the day. At the office.

“We were inundated with lists from the insurance companies,” said Dr. Rodriguez, founder of MMR Healthcare in Boynton Beach, Florida. “Every day we would get a new list — these patients have missing eye exams, these patients are missing mammograms.”

Dr. Rodriguez admits that her knee would sometimes shake when she was faced with yet another list of patients who were out of compliance with recommended exams, because she knew that the data on those lists were sometimes 90 to 120 days out of date.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 60% of American adults have at least one chronic illness, and 42% have two or more such illnesses — with heart disease, cancer, and diabetes leading the list of maladies that require ongoing medical attention and limit daily activities in some way.

Because knowing your patients’ medical histories well plays such a central role in delivering appropriate and effective treatments to them, healthcare providers today need the most effective possible risk-adjustment model available.

Why do medical practices reach out to their patients? The answer seems obvious — because patients who are engaged in their own care tend to be healthier, which makes the job of the physician easier and helps control costs.

But if the answer is so obvious, why don’t more practices have effective Patient Engagement?

For all the advances technology has brought to 21st-century medicine, there remains a need for means of transcribing and transferring information. And because healthcare is as much art as science — and involves human beings — opportunities remain for refining the traditional function of the scribe, from faithfully reproducing information to using human intellect and ingenuity to devise better ways of interpreting data, drawing upon medical knowledge, and making a positive difference in the lives of patients.

Many physicians and their staffs pride themselves on being able to do lots of different tasks. Their intentions are excellent. Doctors, after all, are in the business of helping patients. So, helping as many as possible in the shortest amount of time can’t be a bad thing, right?