How does a physician evaluate their quality of care? The simple answer consists of one easy answer. If they are using paper charts they don’t know what quality of care they provide. An electronic health record will allow a practice to give accurate estimates of the degree of quality they provide.
How the data works
There are hundreds of quality indicators that can be sorted to glean statistics from a practice, Simple reports are as follows:
- Patients with diabetes mellitus with urinary micoralbumin measured within the past year.
- Patients screened for depression in the past year.
- Patients with diagnoses of obesity, hypertension or diabetes with diet/nutrition counseling within the past year.
If some of these numbers fall below the national benchmark, it would follow that some improvements should be forthcoming. With electronic records, practices and hospitals can search for patterns to isolate a problem then suggest an action. This in turn can lead to solutions.
By making slight adjustments in office procedure, staff can quickly evaluate progress which can lead to better outcomes and improved quality. Basic functions can also be a help to physicians to help them improve the bottom line. Some of the functions include:
- Identify and maintaining patient records
- Managing patient demographics – where appropriate, data should be clinically relevant, reportable, and tractable over time
- Manage problem lists
- Manage Patient history – Capture, review, and manage medical procedural/surgical social and family history including important patient reported clinical history.
- Manage medication lists
- Manage clinical documents and notes- Create, correct and authenticate clinical documentation.
- Capture external documents
- Present care plans, guidelines and protocols – Make available guidelines for patient care as appropriate to support order entry and clinical documentation.
- Generate and record patient specific instructions – Specific instructions related to pre- and post-procedural and post-discharge requirements.
- Clinical Coding assistance – Make available all pertinent patient information needed to support coding of diagnoses, procedures and outcomes
- Support of service requests and claims – Support interactions with other systems, applications, and modules to support the creation of health care attachments for submitting clinical information in support of service request and claims.
As you can see, an EMR system can generate a host of valuable data which can be tracked and reviewed at any time. The quick results that you can see will help our physicians to evaluate the data and make decisions to help both parties.
Iron Comet Consulting is a Mckesson Platinum certified reseller, medical IT firm and medical billing service based in Stockbridge, Georgia. Our products combine the clinical with the financial to improve workflow and revenue capture. Mckesson’s Medisoft Clinical is a complete physician practice optimization solution. For more information, please visit http://www.ironcomet.com
