Electronic Health Records For Dummies

Overall goals

What you want the EHR to do for your practice in terms of patient flow can be directly related to your general clinical philosophy about patient care. Think of it like this: In an ideal world, how would you move patients through your practice each day while providing them with the most efficient and optimal care? Think about the following questions:

Is improvement of patient and information flow one of the reasons that you’re moving to an EHR?

What specific issues or challenges do you think the EHR will help improve?

What are the employees’ fears or concerns about patient care as related to implementing the EHR?

What EHR features does the team feel must be included to achieve more efficient patient flow?

With the patient flow picture fresh in your mind, think about your practice’s specific mission and goals for each major portion of the patient flow process. Compile specifics for each of the following categories with some appropriate goals:

Check-in

• Reduce the amount of redundant information that your staff collects from patients.

• Create automated tools for patients to enter and validate their own information.

Rooming patients

• Integrate automated collection of patient vitals.

• Validate key patient information including medications, family history, and past medical and surgical histories.

Provider visit

• Incorporate nursing- or patient-entered information into the physician note.

• Engage the patient in their care through the EHR’s diagrams, trending ...