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Industry News & Events
EHR Incentives: Does adoption truly improve healthcare?
May 27, 2010 - Healthcare providers of all specialties and sizes have faced a wide variety of technological challenges in the last decade. The medical industry is one of many sectors that have made aggressive moves to implement technology solutions, pushed both by internal demand as well as legislation like the HITECH act, which attempts to promote the adoption of electronic health record (EHR) systems amongst healthcare professionals. Despite incentive programs only applying to Medicare and Medicaid, they have created a widespread sense of urgency in the healthcare community that deserves close consideration.
Technology and medical transcription.
Physicians across the country are understandably concerned with ensuring their traditional workflow processes do not become obsolete. Every medical practice must analyze their particular scenario, and ideally apply the best solutions that the market has to offer. However, the fact is doctors have become accustomed to dictating their notes, and creating a rich clinical narrative of their patients´ medical histories. Their relationship with medical transcription services, whether in-house or external, is based on basic industry standards like quality, turnaround time, and pricing. Maintaining this trusting relationship while incorporating EMR´s, or other similar products, has become a challenge for many practices.
One size fits all?
The Dept. of Health & Human Services´ EHR Incentive Programs are based on the .meaningful use. concept. The workgroup assigned to define meaningful use took over a year to produce a complicated, 800-page document that describes 25 objectives, divided into .core. requirements and others that can be customized from a menu set. The first phase of meaningful use is mostly based on data capture and information sharing. The long term objective is to capture data, and use it to spot trends and make informed clinical decisions based on outcomes. This is undeniably a positive step in terms of clinical research and data use, but is it truly the only valid standard for improving healthcare?
Meaningful Use. What about efficiency?
It is interesting to note that no mention is made of efficiency when setting standards for the use of technology. Many EHR vendors will meet meaningful use requirements with their certified software, but make little emphasis on making systems user friendly for doctors, and allowing them to spend more quality time with patients. An excellent example is the limited success of point-and-click systems, which have frustrated medical staffs with stringent requirements that distract physicians and involve them in data-population processes that were covered by medical transcription services in the past. In this and many other cases, technology is attempting to solve a problem that doctors never had in the first place.
In our case, we have developed proprietary technology focused on the transcription workflow, but we.ve also made an effort to provide clients with tools that help to organize, share, and search the medical records we produce for them every day. Advanced search features can be used to locate complete patient histories, or any keywords that may be of interest to the physician and their staff. Records can be shared with any healthcare professional in the US that has a fax number or email. By keeping it simple and efficient, we allow our customers to forget about the process and focus on the substance.
- VIVA Transcription News Team