gery centers that host Medicare patients or accredited facilities that
must collect data for CQI studies. Data is also essential to benchmark
and drive improvements in business performance.
If you work with paper charts, a member of your staff has to spend
valuable working hours collecting and reviewing charts, and recording
needed data. Or perhaps a nurse in the middle of caring for a patient is
forced to record quality measures on a separate clipboard. That's
another piece of paper to manage and another step that takes the
nurse's focus away from patient care.
We integrated quality reporting forms into our EMR system and can
call up and organize the data in seconds. Now we have custom reports
built into our database that automatically generate all the information
we need. There's no longer the need for a nurse or manager to compile
data manually, which is a laborious (or is it tortuous?) process.
5
Pre-admission perks
We incorporated a patient portal into our EMR system that
lets us receive encrypted information from an unlimited num-
ber of patients for $60 a month. It's provided an incredible boost to
our pre-admission efficiencies and patient satisfaction. When cases
are scheduled, we direct patients to our facility's website, where they
access the pre-assessment questionnaire — without the need of a
username or password — and fill out the form at their convenience.
Once patients submit forms, they're automatically directed to our pre-
assessment nurse and anesthesia providers. We've added a phone app
to the online portal that notifies the providers and nurses whenever
we receive a form. One of our anesthesiologists once responded to an
alert on his phone and called the patient minutes after she'd submit-
ted her form. She was impressed.
Our anesthesia providers love this feature. They review patients'
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