Documentation and the EHR: How Prevea Health Provided Flexibility that Clinicians are Happy About.
[This post was written by Charlie Wong, from the Nuance HIM Team]
Last week we noted that one of the goals posted on our "What's Your Goal?" wall at AHIMA was "to see a working electronic health record (EHR) deployed before I retire!" This simple statement speaks to the mountain of complexity involved with deploying an EHR: not only is it a tremendous undertaking to design, configure, and deploy an EHR, but then you have to worry about clinician and staff acceptance and training.
Some organizations at the forefront of the EHR wave have found great solutions to challenges of EHR deployment. One such organization is Prevea Health, based in Green Bay, WI. Prevea has 20 health centers serving the greater Green Bay and Sheboygan areas. It is clinician-owned, so clinician acceptance was one of the critical factors considered when they recently overhauled their clinical documentation process.
Prevea worked with Nuance and Epic Systems to create a flexible clinical documentation solution that provided clinicians with options for documentation in the EHR. Prevea clinicians now have the option to completely self-document through Epic, dictate their notes via Nuance's eScription platform for background speech recognition, or use a combination of the two approaches that allows them to self-document in the EHR and partially dictate notes through eScription when appropriate. When clinicians dictate, the information is processed by eScription background speech recognition, edited by Prevea's in-house medical transcriptionists, then automatically entered into Epic without the cumbersome process of cutting and pasting between the transcription software and the EHR.
One year after go-live, Prevea is reaping the rewards of their innovative approach of merging their EHR with their clinical documentation system. Today, 71 percent of Prevea's clinicians use dictations or partial dictations to document their encounters, while the remaining clinicians self-document completely within the EHR. Turnaround times at Prevea have been reduced from 5 days to less than 24 hours, transcriptionist satisfaction has increased, clinician satisfaction has increased, and since Prevea eliminated outsourcing and overtime using background speech recognition, Prevea's estimated 3-year cost savings is going to be more than $1 million.
By creating a solution that collects and organizes valuable data while offering clinicians flexibility to document encounters in the way that is most comfortable to them, Prevea was able to create a win-win solution that fostered clinician acceptance, improved documentation and reduced costs.