Healthcare IT Professional Speaks on EMR Challenges

Healthcare IT Professional Speaks on EMR Challenges

The transition to Electronic Medical Records (EMR) can be beneficial to the practice, says one IT professional who has weathered the storm for a large group. The conversion is worrying physicians and IT personnel all over the U.S. Compliance dates are looming and few know how meeting those requirements will affect their practice. Two major concerns are the downtime to learn the new system and the coding/data compliance issues.

How does the EMR transition affect workflow and downtime?

EMR connectivity works fine after the medical professionals have used the new system for about two weeks, according to what Patrick Norton, IT guru for Atlanta Women’s Health Group has found. "I see physicians back up to at least their pre-EMR patient load in a matter of a couple of weeks and by a month, some even are increasing their patient load." Norton reports that he sees no problems at all once the physicians and medical practitioners begin to use the system with real patients. "All the lights seem to come on" when the situation is real to the doctor.

Tips for EMR System Training

Norton tells his trainees that the changeover is not difficult, but there is a lot to learn. First, he advises them to bend their thinking to the EMR’s way of recording the data. It’s all how the data is captured, then it just clicks into place. The physicians begin to understand what is important to the EMR system and what can be skipped in certain cases. Being effective with EMR is all about understanding which boxes to check and which to leave blank, and when. The students catch on fast, but that is partly because of the behind the scenes tweaks Norton has made to make entering the data simple. Norton changes or hides some of the check boxes on the electronic forms. He said the he’s learned that if it doesn’t need to be filled in, it is best to hide it, then the information the doctors do need to enter is very visible. He said that he’s found that it is best to have the capability to record all the data and just hide some of the boxes and spaces than it is to try and add those data entry points later.

Transferring Patient Data Across Healthcare Facilities

While EMR data transfer among hospitals, practices, laboratories and other health-related professionals is coming along, there are still problems to work out with connectivity with other EMR systems as there is not yet one dominant platform. That means that among hospitals and other practitioner offices the data does not flow easily and is often transferred to a CD and is physically carried to the other practitioner’s office. Uploading a patient’s laboratory results are still not fully automated either. These are definitely issues that will have to be resolved before EMR can reach its full potential.

Check back next week to read the next installment of this article, how EMR systems affect healthcare coding.