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Technology
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TECHNOLOGY
The practice instituted electronic medical records 2000-2001 which required over 50,000 paper charts to be scanned in. The practice selected an imaged based technology Impact MD Document Management System which is a stand alone solution that enables a medical practice to go paperless and integrate into an electronic health record system. A local company Permadoc scanned each chart in to the electronic file at a cost of $1.00 per chart. In addition, this Impact MD System allows incoming paper, lab reports, hospital notes, patient letters, referring physician request for consultation, and other documentation to be easily scanned into the patient’s chart.
The practice acquired central servers and dedicated T-lines connecting all five offices to the central office in Lexington, Kentucky. This intranet with 200 bit encryption and dedicated T-lines allow a medical record to be brought up in any patient exam room using PC or a Thin Client. In addition, all employees have different levels of access depending on their function as well as physicians as well as other locations throughout the practice’s offices. While many practices may well prefer to use a internet solution with servers located several states away we have been very pleased with the servers being located right in our office and maintained by a local comprehensive computer and communications company with technicians certified in Microsoft, Novell, which have enabled us to leverage our state of the art technology to provide health care at five separate private clinic offices throughout central and eastern Kentucky. We believe that local control over servers allows for increased uptime and a faster response should the system go down. This intranet network provides electronic medical records to all of our clinics as well as centralizes scheduling in a centralized phone call and triage center in addition to centralized billing, teleradiology, and the start of telemedicine. In addition, this technology has allowed patients to make local calls and to be instantly connected to our central office and triage nurse, and also has allowed office workers to simply dial an extension number and talk to another staff employee or physician in our office many of whom may be over 150 miles away by using our own T-line and intranet system.
Also, we have installed voice over internet technology utilizing our own dedicated T-lines to further decrease practice expense as well as improve internal and external communication as now long distance phone calls will be efficiently routed internally through our own T-lines and then frequently a local call made to the final location utilizing this state of the art computer voice over intranet technology. Furthermore, patients can make a local call and talk to any of our offices with the cost of just a local call. In addition, this improved technology has allowed for improved communication between support staff, physicians, and patients and improved patient management.
The practice maintains two separate websites for marketing and patient information, one is www.sbncmd.com and the other is www.openstandupmri.com, that are updated every few years and provides a convenient source of information for referring physicians and patients highlighting our unique imaging, physicians, technology, and unique multispecialty neuroscience solutions to complex neurological problems.
Another practice management solution not requiring technology was simply requiring a manager at each practice location to handle administrative issues related to staff as well as patient administrative complaints or problems, and allowing an open line of communication between practice managers and the CEO, in-house counsel, and other administrative support staff. In addition, the practice maintains an on-call neurosurgeon in the central office available for consultation with internal physicians and/or external referring physicians regarding all aspects of patient care 24 hours a day 7 days a week 365 days a year, and this availability of both administrative and medical side of the practice has been found to be a success.
The practice has used medical manager from day one and continues to use medical manager along with current EMR and has found medical manger to be a robust Unix based system with minimal down time and has continued to be used at this point in time for patient scheduling and billing. In addition, since physicians code on a daily basis medical manager can be used to help effectively triage calls even if documentation for that recent visit is incomplete due to transcription problems or otherwise. This system has also been enhanced by utilizing a revenues cycle management solution and has provided us the ability to do real time eligibility verification, accurately identifying insurance coverage and co-pay responsibility right at registration, and has allowed our practice to control each step in the health care reimbursement cycle and improve efficiency.
The medical staff currently uses state of the art digital portable recorders that allow dictation anywhere or on the run. Recorders can be downloaded from any of the locations to transcription. Reports or neuroimaging consult reports can be transcribed immediately and imported to the EMR eliminating the need for handwritten preliminary reports. All dictation is imported electronically (not scanned in) and physicians can sign off electronically further increasing efficiency.
All of these technologies and other practice management solutions not requiring technologies have improved patient care, referring physician and patient access, cost effectiveness, and overall improved practice efficiency in management and outcomes.
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