One of the beauties of EMR is that you can finish all of your documenting during a patient visit, if you so choose. You can type or click on the fly, and walk out of the exam room with your note completed; no more crib notes to fill-out at some fantasy time when you have more leisure.

But sometimes, documenting outside of the room may be preferable. And as you gain more experience with your system, this may become the norm for you rather than the exception.

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Getting your EMR implementation up to speed should be your primary focus for the first several months of use. But sometimes, the fastest way to fix your EMR is to turn the spotlight on the rest of your office first.

Case in point: working smarter with your office workflow, not harder.

Let’s say your practice runs fairly smoothly. Your front and back office staff get along well, and smiles are the order of the day. No one is surly or plays passive-aggressive games, and everyone is deferential to you, the central axis of the office.

You get your EMR up and running, and everyone, including yourself, gets surprisingly adept at it. You especially love how you can fire off a series of tasks to staff in mere seconds, and track how well they’re carried out, for the good of your patients and the practice.

But after a while, your staff shows signs of strain. Eventually, you have to call a meeting, when it becomes clear that there’s a LOT of extra work and backlog happening, and your staff has been sweating and fighting the good fight for months.

And this is a best case scenario! How did EMR let you down?
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Nobody wants to crash and burn their EMR.

It’s supposed to be pretty hard to do that, thanks to the built-in redundancy of most large scale systems. Your patient data isn’t going anywhere — in NextGen, for example, it’s backed up automatically on multiple servers. And while I’m more a fan of the nearly crashproof Unix-based operating system, 98% of the software industry finds Windows solid enough to design their EMR’s around. Short of a meteor strike or Armageddon, your EMR should function just fine, if used as designed.

What you do to it, however, is another matter entirely.

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There are 4 critical themes that underlie effective EMR use, regardless of your hardware, software, or practice setup.

Understand them well, and you will save heaps of time, protect yourself better medico-legally, and use your EMR to its fullest — to the benefit of yourself, your practice, and most importantly, your patients.

Ignore them, and…well, you’ll be reading this article again!

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This site is under construction, and will go live real soon.

Stay tuned, for tips on transitioning smoothly to an EMR, getting used to it, then making it work super efficiently for you and your patients.

I have 5 continuous years of experience with an EMR system — NextGen — which is now being used across all our medical group offices, and being adopted as the system of choice for the local primary care and specialty groups for our IPA.

But the insights I’ve gleaned apply to any EMR system, regardless of vendor. How you work on paper, switch to keyboards or tablets, and use or misuse your system — and how you can customize it to you, instead of you to it — are all independent of your system’s manufacturer, or your own specialty.

You can make choices that toughen your days (ever wanted to throw your computer out the window, or pound your mouse to get its attention?), or that make your practice flow as smooth as it did before — smoother, even, with better documentation, error checking, and justified upcoding. Even seeing more patients, faster and safer.

Click here for an example of my work, on my other medical blog and podcast.

Hope you find what comes useful.