Inpatient medicine is unique. Unlike the singular relationship between patient and provider in the office, hospitalized patients are often cared for by a team of doctors and APPs, sometimes changing on a daily basis. How are these providers to relay information to each other? With each day there is another chapter of a patient’s [...]
Managing hospital rounding is completely different from seeing patients in the office. Outpatient medicine doesn’t have many moving parts. You have a schedule - you see your patients - the end. Inpatient medicine is a mess. There is no schedule. You and your partners need to figure out who is going to round and [...]
Early in my clinical applications career, we were wading through Meaningful Use Stage 2. It was painful for all concerned. Perhaps one of the biggest associated challenges we had to work through was pop-up fatigue. This culminated when we rolled out an important part of meeting MU2 – a Clinical Decision Support tool. The CDS [...]
Patients are getting lost between the in-patient and out-patient world. This results in higher readmissions, sicker patients, and skyrocketing healthcare costs. Today, on average, the national rate for 30-day all-cause readmission is almost 15% (see Figure 1 below). Source: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), Center for Delivery, Organization, and Markets, Healthcare Cost [...]
For years, clinic practices, hospitals, surgery centers, urgent care, assisted living, nursing homes, etc., have operated in silos. You’re probably thinking, “Tell me something I don’t know!” Here we are in the era of technology, where there is an app for everything, and we still cannot track patients as they flow throughout our community healthcare [...]
Going paperless is not just simply adopting an Electronic Medical Record. This is just the first step, as your practice likely manages a ton of paper in other areas. Paper truly impedes the overall goal of having an integrated and collaborative healthcare team. Many employees prefer paper. You can touch it, refer to it, and [...]
Rounding with a purpose. Interesting,…tell me more. Heavy caseload. Multiple hospitals. Sick patients—some, very high risk. Long hours. Exhausted. Missed dinners. No relief in sight. Fast forward. You adopt a mobile charge capture solution that automatically sends charges to your biller and billing staff because missed charges mean lost revenue – for the work you [...]
I remember the days when writing “Agree with above” in the paper chart was enough to satisfy the clinical documentation gods. Those were simpler times. A modern clinical practice has become more complicated – not just with documentation requirements. Demands on medical providers who are caring for an aging population have increased exponentially. Balancing office [...]
