Intend to Serve the patients or the EMRs?

A common consensus among medical practice managers is that EMRs have had a big negative impact on Costs and Revenue of the practice. Though EMRs were supposed to simplify all the works, the need for manual entry has made it much harder for both the staff and the doctors.

Considerable amounts of time are wasted by providers on non-core activity of updating EMR.

Previously, the filing of records would mean just sorting and putting all the printed records into a physical file of a patient, which would hardly take 5 minutes for each patient.

Now, sorting and filing into EMR takes approximately 20 minutes for each patient, effectively the staff is spending more than triple the time they used to spend.

A study by Deloitte reveals that 7 out of 10 physicians think that EHRs reduce their productivity.

Previously, while creating notes, the doctors can either just dictate over a Dictaphone whenever they find time, spending approximately 5 minutes per note and the transcriptionist will type the notes and send it back, which is put into the physical chart by the staff.

Now, the doctor has to be mindful of entering the details into EMR all the while as he is speaking to a patient. When the chart is done totally by the doctor, it takes around 10 to 20 minutes for the doctor to finish each note on the EMR. This results in the doctor overworking, less face time with patients, seeing fewer patients or staying back beyond office hours, and finally not able to spend much family time, resulting in a burnout.

These are just two examples, there are several works like this which have impacted the practice very badly. It is like the doctors and staff are serving the EMRs most of the time rather than serving the patients.

Practice managers are having a hard time retaining their overworked staff and are recruiting more staff for the same quantum of work, resulting in higher costs to the practice. Doctors seeing lesser patients ultimately results in lesser revenue for the practice.

With the lowering revenue and higher costs, the practice managers are finding it hard to balance their act. One excellent solution that is emerging is looking for other options to manage the mundane work carried out by the staff, thus reducing the need for more staff at-hand and making them available for more efficient work.

Delegating such manual work to a reputed concern with highly skilled manpower will effectively bring down the cost. Delegation offshore will further reduce the cost and have more efficient turnaround time, literally, the work will be finished overnight. Solution for the doctors would be to get the help of remote scribes for preparing their notes on EMR. The doctors can once again just carry out the conversation not thinking about EMR all the time, but just giving some hints to the scribes and send the recorded conversation to the remote scribe who can then update the note into EMR within few minutes to hours.

The doctors may just have to spend 30 minutes to one hour to review all the notes, sign off and go home early. With doctors starting to see more patients, more revenue comes in, making the practice more profitable, thus settling all the woes of practice manager.

Since 1999 Seyyone has been offering scribing, labor-intensive EMR updating, HIM, and RCM services that cater to all the needs of a medical practice. Most clients who did a trial are hooked and they prefer to stay with and enjoy the impeccable services.