Practice to the Top of Your License

February 28, 2018

Charles-Guillaume Etienne is credited with the oft-used quote “if you want something done right, do it yourself”.

I admit that I might be a tiny bit controlling. Okay – maybe more than a tiny bit. But only in most areas of my life.

I remember my young daughters coming into the kitchen, wanting to help me prepare dinner. When it came to preparing weeknight dinners, I had a groove. You see, I’ve just come home after a long day at work, dinner is due on the table in 45 minutes and I know that the “help” my daughters offer will slow me down because they’ll be in my way, will need me to find safe tasks I can delegate to them and ultimately, they’ll throw off my groove. But, what if I taught them how to do some things that helped me in the long run? What if I developed a new groove?

So, I taught them how to prep the vegetables, cook the rice, put a pot of water on the stove and preheat the oven. I “controlled” what veggies got washed, how hot to set the oven and when to put the rice on. I found that it was a tremendous help to me when these things were done before I even got home. Dinner took less time to prepare.

How does giving up control improve clinical workflow?

The average physician student loan is over $165,000. The average hourly rate for a Medical Assistant is around $15 an hour. As the revenue generators of your organization, why then do so many physicians spend their time prepping vegetables? If the ROS (Review of Systems) was their vegetable, that is. How many more patients could be seen each day if the physician could save three minutes of data entry per encounter?

Think about the patient’s review of systems; No single response to a single ROS query is going to be pathognomonic. When you think about it, documenting the patient’s ROS begins as a matter of transcribing what the patient ticked off on the ROS form. So why are so many physicians loathe to hand that task off to their intake MA? If everyone practiced to the top of their licensure it would allow the physician to give up that task which in turn gives them time to do what they were trained to do: put the pieces of the puzzle together to uncover disease and dysfunction and then decide how to address it. As the physician is talking to their patient during the examination, they naturally continue that ROS query, calculating and adjusting all the while.

What if the physician could control what the MA enters into the patient’s ROS? What if the physician could ultimately see more patients or go home just a few minutes earlier than usual by simply giving up some of that control…yet controlling what they are giving up. Sounds like a win-win to me.

The NextGen EHR allows the physician to build defaults all over the place. In fact, there are many time-saving tools built into NextGen and the majority of them are underutilized. If the physician builds the ROS template default and their MA applied it to the encounter, they just might save themselves a few minutes of data entry. Now, they can review the ROS, make relevant changes and move on to the real stuff.

I would love to show you a few ways to make your physicians happier with their NextGen EHR. Please reach out for a quick discovery call.