Once again, I’m attending the annual NextGen EMR Users Group Meeting on all that’s new and shiny in the world of high-end, integrated electronic medical record and practice management systems.
New faces and new directions this year, of course. And a terrific keynote address by Pat Croce, former owner of the Philadelphia 76-ers.
But this year, the prize for the most awesome personage goes to Dr. Jan Lee — engaging, encouraging, and passionate about quality health care.
And her focus this year is on a revamped version of an older technology: report generation. And if there was ever a cornerstone of The Next Big Wave of electronic records, this is it.
Gold Mine
What the heck is report generating, and why should you care?
You may have heard of a related, sexier phrase: data mining. Simply put, it’s the ability to treat your EMR like the database that it is, and to ask it all sorts of questions that you could never logistically do with paper charts. Every major EMR vendor should have some version of this capacity.
Without it, good luck taking your patient care to the next level of quality. It’s really as simple as that.
What Kind Of Questions?
Here are some typical examples:
- How many patients do I have taking Lipitor?
- What are the phone #s, mailing addresses, and emails of all my patients taking Drug X, which was just recalled this morning?
- Who are my female patients over age 40 who haven’t had a mammogram and breast exam in the past year?
- What percentage of my diabetic patients have had an HbA1C in the past 3 months?
Once you “ask” your system these questions, it should take something like 5-10 minutes, tops, to get answers for all four of them.
Any one of those questions would have previously involved manually pouring over each and every paper chart in your chart stacks. Just visualizing the manpower needed to do so for all 4 questions, accurately, should make you want to curl up into a little mewling ball.
It’s not hyperbole to say that pre-EMR, asking these kinds of questions would have been impossible.
Who Should Care? EVERYONE!
The benefits of asking and answering questions like this apply to everyone: you, your patients, your insurers, and potentially the entire American health care system. I’m a big proponent of win-win-win scenarios, and this is definitely one of them.
YOU win, of course, because you can generate actionable information that could save your bacon, or bring home more of it.
- All those patients overdue for various health maintenance actions — a physical, a mammogram, a colonoscopy, an eye exam — can be found and listed, then reminded to “maintain” their health.
- If you keep track of when patients with problems have closure — coming back from a specialist, or getting specific lab tests — you can search for those patients who have failed to close the loops, and remind them to do so, and why it’s critical that they do.
- Negotiating with payers about your reimbursement rates? It’s a lot easier to argue (especially from an organizational standpoint) when you can prove your patients’ compliance with Pay For Performance guidelines exceed national or local standards — like how 97% of your diabetics are up to date on their HbA1C’s, 92% have LDL’s less than 100, and 100% of them have had a dilated retinopathy exam.
THE INSURERS win, because their patients are demonstrably getting quality care, which translates into fewer and shorter hospital stays, and less sick (i.e. costly to insure) people.
And of course, YOUR PATIENTS win, because the natural human tendency towards procrastination and self-delusion — letting things slide generally means letting medical problems ripen and spoil — is being countered by a passionless but tireless EMR, that focuses on the facts.
If you’re too cynical to believe in win-win-win scenarios, think of it this way: Is it in your patients’ best interests to have you remind them to take important action on their health?
