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Case Study
BACKGROUND:
BEVERLY HOSPITAL - A community hospital in suburban Los Angeles, with an emergency department annual census of 35,000, used an old Kurzweil system for physician documentation since 1990. Difficult to learn when new practitioners come on staff, outdated print-outs and cumbersome to use at best, described their situation.
REQUIREMENTS:
With nearly 15 years experience in using an archaic EMR, this diverse group of career, board certified emergency physicians and nurse practitioners had detailed ideas of what they wanted in a system. They wanted it to be:
- Easy to learn.
- Fast, with routine charts created in less than a minute.
- Compliant, as it must support documentation of difficult cases with atypical findings.
- Flexible, providing multiple modalities because everyone is different.
- Efficient, allowing the ability to easily know the status of a patient.
- Comfortable and easy to use; in order to truly solve documentation needs, everyone must use it 100% of the time and must want to use it.
- Searchable, allowing you to quickly retrieve, view and “clone” records forward.
- Modular, providing the ability to use one module (for example, physician documentation) without another (for example, nursing), or vise versa.
- Adaptable, allowing you to add multimedia to your chart: pictures, EKGs and insurance cards.
- Realistic, as most tracking is dependent on human data input, creating the “garbage in, garbage out” problem. The application must limit but not eliminate human input.
- Powerful. Due to legacy systems’ resistance to interfacing, the product must have the ability to generate paper or actual CPOE.
OPTIONS:
The options to satisfy their requirements were:
- Purchase existing software. There are many current, similar vendors of EDIS and all say they offer essentially the same features. While all say they satisfy the core requirements, a closer look reveals deficiencies. If a product doesn’t meet the fundamental requirement of 100 % physician documentation, all the “bells and whistles” are irrelevant, since they won’t be available unless the user actually USES the product. Lost in all the “extras” is the fact that none was particularly easy to use, in spite of accompanying literature to the contrary.
- Build our own. Admittedly, a daunting premise. What this is saying is, “we can build a better mousetrap” and we believe we could and did!
SOLUTION:
In the spring of 2004, Touch Medix was introduced. Initial skepticism was quickly changed to enthusiastic acceptance. All 10 practitioners use it for 100% of their emergency encounter documentation. One other practitioner was a 100% user prior to moving to another facility. As one of our new physicians said, a veteran of several previous EMR installations, “This was so much easier than all the others I had to use.”
EXPERIENCE:
Our physicians and nurse practitioners are happy. The hospital medical records department, virtually never calls for lost charts. Our billing company is able to electronically receive charting, making coding and completion of the billing cycle faster, easier and more efficient.
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