Wiki Staff Changes with EMR?

[medicalsec]

I was wondering if offices have had to add more people since they have gone to their EMR. We have five doctors and two front desk employees who currently make appointments, prepare charts, do referrals, etc. We have a constant paperwork flow because our doctors are also surgeons who are also always on call. We are a busy office. The doctors think that the front desk will be able to create all of the charts electronically for the patients visits and also be able to take care of all of the scanning of reports into the EMR system, and create accounts, and assign the paperwork to the account. We receive stacks of paperwork every day.

I was wondering how others have handled the work flow changes.

Thanks,

Dee

 

[armen]

I was wondering if offices have had to add more people since they have gone to their EMR. We have five doctors and two front desk employees who currently make appointments, prepare charts, do referrals, etc. We have a constant paperwork flow because our doctors are also surgeons who are also always on call. We are a busy office. The doctors think that the front desk will be able to create all of the charts electronically for the patients visits and also be able to take care of all of the scanning of reports into the EMR system, and create accounts, and assign the paperwork to the account. We receive stacks of paperwork every day.

I was wondering how others have handled the work flow changes.

Thanks,

Dee

We did not add any additional positions since we started EMR, we have one person on check out and one on check in, third person does all medical records including scanning.

 

[bran1120]

It will depend on your specialty and how much time you spend prepping charts but potentially, yes, you may have to add staff. It's particularly difficult for a small staff to do all of the EHR required tasks while seeing patients. We are also seeing an increase in the amount of time our staff must spend on making sure the EHR is noted for meeting the new meaningful use requirements, ePrescribing and quality guidelines and I only see this becoming more timeconsuming with each new phase.

 

[amjordan]

A few of our offices did bring in temp help, or internships from the local medical programs to help during the conversion of paper to the electronic medium. They just entered patient facesheet and history information and scanned in the parts of the charts that they providers wanted in the system prior to retired the paper chart. At this point, none of our offices have hired additional staff due to EHR.

Now our offices took a long hard look at all of their paper workflows to see if they were still necessary in the EHR environment. What they found out was that with the proper equipment (scanners, fax modem, lab interface) some of their paper workflows would be obsolete.