EHR Physician Adoption

Physician documentation is a major component of practicing medicine. Complete and appropriate documentation can be time consuming and costly. Traditional dictation incorporating manual transcription remains an option for many practices. A host of alternatives exist in the EHR (Electronic Health Record) world aimed at increasing efficiency and reducing costs. Assessing these alternatives and implementing the best set of solutions is a critical step to help physicians make the transition to an EHR. Successful adoption demands careful consideration of multiple options that can be chosen by the community of physicians in your practice depending on the nature of the visit, physician tolerance for change, and more appropriate technology match for the physician and their personality. Whatever the solution: cost, productivity, reimbursement, patient safety, patient and physician satisfaction should all be considered carefully.

Options for physician documentation include:

1. Leverage telephone or voice recorder devices to dictate the entire note for manual transcription. Solution can be accomplished with or without an interface.
   
2. Leverage telephone or voice recorder devices to dictate while taking advantage of macros on the back end to reduce dictation and transcription effort. Solution can be accomplished with or without an interface.
   
3. Leverage telephone or voice recorder devices to dictate while taking advantage of back end voice to text technology to assist transcriptionists and to reduce transcription effort. Solution typically requires an interface.
   
4. Leverage dictation markers to minimize the portion(s) of the note that need to be dictated and transcribed. Solution typically requires a bi-directional interface.
   
5. Leverage front end voice to text software to remove need for transcriptionists. Solution requires no interface.
   
6. Leverage point and click templates to build the documentation for the visit. Solution requires no interface.
   
7. Leverage text templates or macros to build the documentation for the visit. Solution requires no interface.
   
8. Physician manual typing
   
9. Provide physicians patient worksheets (piece of paper) that can be marked up and handed off to support staff member for entry into the EHR.
   

There are pros and cons to each of the options. Assessing the options for your organization, choosing the best matches and implementing the solutions correctly, is critical to your success. You will need to arrive at a subset of these options that best supports adoption while remaining supportable.

For more details on how to select the best options, best practices for implementation, training and support, contact us for additional information at information@projectnavigation.com.