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EMR and can just grab it and pull it down. It takes them less than 3 minutes to
do a complete chart and sign it off and be done." That is boosting the facility's
bottom line. "I could not imagine being able to do the case volume that we do
if we had to go back to dictation or the old way of practicing," says Ms. Tafoya.
If there's anything in the EMR the doctors at Safety Harbor Surgery Center
don't like or want changed, says Ms. Keenan, the vendor is "able to work
through everything on the phone and update it right then and there." Her docs,
she says, push a button and get a personalized dropdown menu that can be
pre-populated, so they "only have to hit a couple of checkmarks, unless there's
something unique about the case."
Consider the possibilities
If you can imagine it, there's a good chance your EMR can do it. But only 16%
of our respondents say they're "very confident" they're using their EMRs to
their maximum potential. Sound familiar? What benefits might you be missing
out on?
"We worked with our vendor on lab work requisitions," says Ms. Keenan.
"Now if we need a biopsy from an endoscopy case, the complete demographic
information is already there — the patient's name, the procedure, the date of
the procedure. You just open up one little screen, put in one bit of information
and click a button. It prints out your lab request, your demographics and your
labels to put on your specimen container. We used to have hand-write all that."
Billing has also gotten faster and easier, says Ms. Tafoya. "We don't have any
outstanding orders or dictations that need to be signed," she says. "So we can
bill immediately, the day of. We send out our report to the billing company and
they bill right off of the report. And the primary care provider gets the report
electronically that day."
What else can you imagine?
"I had a case where one of our docs was interested in buying into the cen-
ter," says Ms. Hummel. "He needed to know how many patients he'd done here
