The Flint Hills Community Health Center’s new electronic medical records system is a one-stop shop with patient information in both the medical and dental practices.
The medical side of the community health center went live with electronic medical records last week. Dental went live on Monday. There is a learning curve, but the transition is going smoothly, said Farren Hurwitz, clinical implementer for Health Choice Network, the company the health center is contracting with for electronic medical records. Hurwitz is helping to implement the system at the center.
Betty Murrell, interim executive director of the community health center and chief financial officer, said the expectation on the federal level is for all health centers to go to electronic medical records.
“Electronic medical records have slowly gained acceptance in the health-care industry,” Murrell said. “Especially after President (George) Bush in 2004 said he wanted all Americans to have an electronic patient record by 2014. Proponents, who envision a nationwide online database of medical information, say the records can speed up medical decisions, avoid errors and save lives.”
In the future, implementing electronic medical records could be tied to Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements.
“This would mean that a practice would receive the maximum benefit,” Murrell aid.
Murrell added that electronic medical records benefit the community as well as patients. Community benefits include enhancement of the health center’s medical and dental provider recruitment and retention, establishment of a medical home for patients and for records of immunizations. Patient benefits include improvement of quality of care, an increase in patient safety, electronic prescribing of all non-controlled substances, ability for the center to send health-maintenance letters, better documentation and a possible decrease in appointment time.
The center was able to get the electronic medical records system at a discounted price because of a grant that Health Choice Network applied for. Hurwitz said Health Choice Network has a team of grant writers to write grants for medical practices to implement electronic medical records and get equipment to enhance the system.
Right now, the clinic staff is busy entering about 10,000 patient records into the system. Portions of charts will be scanned into the system. New patients will go directly into the system, Murrell said.
“Everybody has really worked together as a team,” Murrell said. “They are awesome. They really wanted to learn. It’s been received well.”
Tuesday morning, dental staff were busy entering patient records into the system as they worked on patients. It was their second day of using the system live. Hurwitz talked about the screen a dental assistant was working with that showed a graphic of a patient’s teeth. The teeth were color coded on screen to give dental staff an at-a-glance look at which teeth have been worked on. The chart on the screen mirrored the paper chart the staff member was holding. The only difference was she didn’t have to hand color the graphic. The computer did it for her, all at a click of the mouse.
“It’s all graphical,” Hurwitz said.
The electronic medical records system does much more than store patient records. It also lists allergy information with pop-up alerts. This prevents patients from being prescribed a medication they are allergic to. Before electronic medical records, an allergy sticker was placed on charts.
Another feature of the electronic medical records system is the ability to print out patient education handouts right from the system. A link is embedded into the system by diagnosis. Providers can print out educational information from the link. A note is then automatically placed in the patient’s chart indicating that an educational hand-out was given to the patient.
Some employees use laptops for the electronic medical records system. The laptops are wireless and have a thumbscreen that recognizes users’ thumbprints so only authorized users can use the laptop.
Another key feature of the system is the ability to show patients’ health history in graphic form. Weight over a period of time can be instantly converted into a graph for patients to chart progress. This can be done for other patient information as well.
“You can tell a patient that their glucose level is high but that doesn’t mean anything to them,” Hurwitz said. “But if you show them a graph they can tell what it’s doing.”