Any New Year’s resolutions, yet?
We’ve got a good one floating around the office these days: becoming more adept with the EMR.
“For goodness sakes,” said our nurse practitioner after being shown a keystroke shortcut. “What a time saver!”
“THAT’S the kind of thing we need to share with each other — shortcuts and tips it’d take forever to find on our own.”
What a concept: taking advantage of community wisdom. Something you can’t get out of your system’s instruction manual.
Something only you and your fellow users can make happen, once you get some momentum going.
Take Advantage Of An EMR Committee
It doesn’t take a village, but it sure is easier if you’ve got a posse behind you.
If you don’t have a group of fellow EMR users already, strongly consider starting one, as previously recommended here.
If there’s already a group, attend the meetings regularly. With systems administered on an ASP model, your tech support should already be there, telling you about the latest bug fixes and customizations that can make your life easier. Customizations that YOU can have input on, now that you’re in attendance.
Invariably, you’ll catch sight of how more experienced users are “working” the system to save time and effort, doing critical tasks more smoothly and consistently.
That kind of thing is worth the price of admission alone — picking up a single tip that saves you a couple minutes, each and every time you touch a patient chart.
Learn By (Watching The Other Guy) Doing
Invariably, we all work in the thick of it with our heads down, grimly approximating lightspeed as best we can.
If you get through the day intact, you assume that your charting style was “good enough.” You don’t know how other folks do their charts, you haven’t had time to really think about that. Enough like you for everyone to muddle through, right?
Like the Gershwins said in Porgy and Bess, It ain’t necessarily so.
Using your EMR well involves a constant dance of automating and improving upon your existing workflow. But to improve upon it, you have see it first — and have an idea of what a “better” version would look like.
Chart reviews are a good way to see how other folks are charting well (or not). The committee can do this randomly, or groups can do this internally.
Profiling good charts helps the most: showing examples of what successful users of your EMR are doing. Such “power users” can demonstrate how they handle a typical encounter, sharing what the advantages for them have been, while illustrating exactly how you can achieve similar results. Other group members can chime in and critique, creating improved hybrid strategies on the spot. Everyone, including the power user, benefits.
Sign Up To Become A Power User
If your EMR vendor has a Users Group meeting or convention that meets annually, guess what? The newest developments are revealed here, as well as time lines for drool-worthy features, and tutorials on getting your processes smoothed out. I strongly recommend that you attend — didn’t see that one coming, did you?
Additionally, there may be local vendor-sponsored educational opportunities you should also consider attending, along with your staff.
Once your office has developed some basic overall competence, these classes may be your quickest way to becoming a power user. NextGen for example has courses you can sign up for, that teach what the best practices using the system are doing. Sort of a corporate-approved EMR committee, drawing from the collective wisdom of a much bigger user base than yours.
There are important principles you need to keep in mind for optimal EMR use — like what The EMR Show tries to pass on. But there’s no substitute for direct experience, with a system just like the implementation you’re using.
And if it takes a few man-months to get reasonably adept at your system, why not combine the experiences of a room full of users to cut that learning curve down to size?
