Evolve your Practice EMR, one lunch at a time.
By John Hawkins, MBI
You've been working hard to achieve your goal. Whether it's a financial level, hitting that perfect weight, or running your first marathon, you've spent a
great deal of time and energy to get there. Regardless of what you have accomplished, you don’t just stop and say that's good enough. No, you keep working and
practicing to get even better. Well, the same holds true for the EMR you've just spent a significant amount of time to implement. Whether it was last week or
last year, the process of evolving workflows and incorporating EMR features into your practice should never stop. It's not difficult and the process not only
enhances the functionality of your EMR, but also helps give all of your staff a sense of ownership in the system.
Here's one simple way I've found to help examine a process or two:
Set the stage
Step 1: Pick a standing, once-a-month lunchtime to hold a 1 hour meeting.
Step 2: Pick one or two common processes, such as ‘How do we handle Phone Calls" or "How do we handle documents that are sent in from the outside."
Step 3: Close the clinic for that time to alleviate interruptions.
Step 4: Invite everybody to the meeting. That includes front office staff, MAs, Nurses, and Providers. Remember, you're building
ownership across the entire staff. Don't let anybody off the hook for showing up and participating.
Step 5: Put up a big sheet of paper to plot the conversation, assign a moderator to lead the discussion, and someone to document the workflow on the paper.
Examine the process
Step 1: Start with the most basic question: "What happens when you...?" From there, keep drilling down until the process, from that person's view, is
considered done. Don't let anything that may seem trivial escape the questioning. Ask plenty of "..and then what do you do?" questions.
Step 2: Ask another person the same question. What you are looking for are variations of the same process among different people.
Step 3: If the process you are examining involves another role (such as handing off a note from the front desk to the nurse), start your questions again with
that person. Continue with the "..and then what?" question until all involved parties tell you how they are involved in the workflow and the process has been
documented for everybody to see.
Now Standardize
Step 1: Evaluate everyone's response to the process. Look for commonalities and differences
Step 2: Look for the single most efficient way to handle to process. Ask the participants for their input and stress that they are helping to evolve the EMR
into something they will feel is more functional. The goal here is to document a new way of doing things that everybody does the same way.
Step 3: Document the new process and get agreement from all parties that they will, from now on, utilize the new workflow.
Conclusion
This method is not for large, complicated processes. If your goal is to increase patient volume by 15% in the next two months, this is not the forum. This
meeting is meant to examine disparate processes in your environment and come to consensus on a standard way of doing them. You may be surprised at the variations
between providers and staff and those variations hurt EMR use. So give it a try, start simple and have fun doing this. But most important, keep practicing. You
will be amazed at the workflow improvements.
If you would like more information on how to improve your Practice’s EMR please contact VCS at vcs@getvitalized.com.