Category: EHR

Saince announces the launch of tele-medicine feature within its clinical documentation solution

Doc-U-Scribe clinical documentation solution now comes integrated with tele-medicine workflow. Physicians and administrators can create tele-consultation sessions with patients seamlessly from within the application. This process eliminates the need for providers to use separate solutions – one for clinical documentation and another for video session.

The COVID-19 public health crisis has accelerated the use of tele-medicine solutions among healthcare provides across the nation. However, many small hospitals and physician offices do not have access to a single solution that takes care of all their needs. Physicians are forced to use multiple solutions to complete their tele-medicine workflow. They are often finding this process frustrating and cumbersome.

Doc-U-Scribe clinical documentation solution which is used by hundreds of hospitals and physician offices across the country provides an integrated and seamless workflow for clinical documentation as well as tele-medicine.   This new HIPAA compliant tele-medicine solution can cut costs, increase efficiency, and improve physician satisfaction significantly.

Saince announced that this new feature will be available to all their existing customers immediately. Saince also announced that with their plug and play model, any new hospital or physician office can be up and running with their tele-medicine program within 48 hours.

EHR

EHRs, Documentation Leading to a Physician Burnout Crisis

Dictation and Transcription Improvements Cited as No. 1 Fix by Docs

When they were kids thinking about their future career, physicians didn’t dream of taking care of administrative record-keeping. They dreamed about taking care of patients.

But extensive documentation fatigue has become a leading concern for the healthcare industry. Just this week, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released a draft strategy aimed at reducing the amount of time clinicians spend recording information in electronic health records (EHRs). Now there’s an open 60-day comment period for clinicians and others to provide feedback to the draft strategy.

The healthcare industry is waking up to the reality of doctors’ serious unhappiness with EHRs. Many physicians seems to agree with one emergency room physician who sees EHRs as “predominantly a billing tool, secondarily a compliance tool … [There are] too many boxes to click, too many irrelevant alerts, soft or hard stops which create alert fatigue. [There is] very little useful clinical decision support.”

EHR(Electronic Health Records)

 

And that unhappiness with the tools is leading to overall dissatisfaction. In a nationwide survey of 254 physicians from different specialties, physicians cite EHRs as the biggest contributing factor to burnout.

 

Incredibly, the amount of time physicians spend on administrative work has surpassed the amount of time spent with patients. A study published last year in Health Affairs reveals that physicians spend more of their time doing “desktop medicine” as they do seeing patients. Desktop medicine includes “communicating with patients through a secure patient portal, responding to patients’ online requests for prescription refills or medical advice, ordering tests, sending staff messages, and reviewing test results.” The study, which analyzed 31 million EHR transactions over four years by primary care physicians, shows that physicians are logging an average of 3.08 hours with patients and 3.17 hours on documentation every day.

With the demands for a more physician-friendly EHR, doctors have identified dictation and transcription as a preferred part of a better EHR solution. In the same survey where EHRs are blamed as the primary contributor to physician burnout, the No. 1 suggestion (17 percent) for fixing the problem was to add dictation and scribe features to EHRs. The second and third suggestions were not even solutions, but complaints, with 13 percent recommending that less time be spent in the system and 9 percent of respondents recommending that EHRs be replaced altogether.

The survey respondents were clear that the EHR workflow was not an innovation. Restoring dictation and transcription would help, respondents say. One orthopedic surgeon commented, “Develop a better and more user-friendly EHR. It shouldn’t take 20 minutes to do something that dictation takes three minutes.”

For help understanding how a state-of-the-art dictation and transcription platform can deliver proven benefits to physician practices, hospitals, integrated delivery networks (IDNs) and medical transcription services organizations (MTSOs) of all sizes, and successfully integrate with leading EHR systems, read about Doc-U-Scribe or contact Saince.

EMRs Taking Away Close to One-Third of Physicians’ Work Time – AMA

The EMR Time Crunch

A common complaint among physicians across practices and specialties has been the amount of time that was previously spent attending to patients is now being occupied by clinical documentation.  These time disparities can have adverse effects on physician-patient relationships, and also limit the number of patients able to receive care from a physician or practice. Value-based purchasing models are frequently the basis for physician reimbursements, and because these models require extensive documentation to accurately report the quality and cost of care, the EMR software physicians are required to use is becoming increasingly complex and time consuming.

AMA Findings

A recent study conducted by the American Medical Association focusing specifically on the use of electronic health records in academic centers concluded that an average of 27% of the participating Ophthalmologists’ time spent on patient examinations was occupied by EMR use. On average a total of 5.8 minutes per patient and 3.7 hours was spent working in EMR on any given full day of clinic.  The study also found a negative association between the amount of time spent on EMR per patient encounter and overall clinic patient volume.

The AMA study concluded what many physicians have been expressing for years: doctors have limited time to spend with patients while they are spending more time within EMRs. Aside from the strain EMR places on physicians’ time and patient relationships, it is also creating cumbersome clerical burdens when completed incorrectly or hastily. Large swaths of copied and pasted text create bloated and messy records, and a lack of training and technical knowledge can result in incorrect coding, medical errors, and frequent interruptions in the documentation process.

Physician Dissatisfaction

The amount of physician dissatisfaction has also grown with the increased implementation of EMRs. Nearly half of all physicians report feeling unsatisfied with their work-life balance, and 57% of physicians display signs of burnout. The additional time requirements of clinical documentation are a significant factor in both of these statistics. Physicians are spending an increasing amount of time outside of regular work hours completing EMRs, and an increasingly less amount of time on actual patient care and interaction. This has led to heightened levels of stress and job dissatisfaction.

Looking Forward

While the path hasn’t always been an easy one, electronic medical records are here to stay, and they do present a plethora of benefits to clinical documentation, patient care, and bottom lines. The challenge that needs to be addressed is how to make EMRs efficient and thorough, while minimizing the amount of time physicians are required to spend on them.  Perhaps the solution for better EMR efficiency lies within a hybrid workflow — a workflow that combines the traditional model of medical transcription, where physicians dictate patient encounters and trained transcriptionists and coders review the reports for accuracy and sufficiency, combined with the advantages of using a modern day EMR is the most efficient way to ensure document quality and lessen the time burden EMRs place on physicians. When the responsibility of clinical documentation is not placed solely on the physician, doctors will be able to attend to more patients, improve patient relationships, and increase their job satisfaction.