Advice for Group Two

So, Group Two's training date is fast approaching. Do you have any advice for them?

Here are a few things I would suggest:
-- Try to start patients two months and under on EMR. Make them your priority in your first few weeks.
-- Learn to navigate your way around Greenway BEFORE training starts. Get with your Super User and set up your preferences, learn how to pull up your schedule, search for a patient and their demographic info, and how to schedule an appointment. This will save you wasting an hour or two of time with your Greenway trainer doing stuff that your super user is more than capable of doing.
-- Don't get too frustrated. If it's slowing you down, go back to paper for the rest of the morning, then try another e-patient in the afternoon.

Did you survive the slowdown?

Those of us on EMR faced a new challenge this week-- a big decrease in speed due to problems with the main server. Luckily we weren't shut down completely, due to Brock's plan for built-in redundancy.
Speed at our office was slow enough that I went back to paper charts for a day. I was surprised to find that it was a real pain to chart on paper again-- way too much writing.
Luckily we're back up to reasonable speeds.
How's everyone doing on EMR?

And for some GREAT NEWS-- Earl is a Dad! His daughter was born on Friday night, 7 pound 2 ounces. Mom and baby are doing great.

One Week of Totally Electronic Patients, Like, Totally

So I like, totally, did a whole week of electronic patients. Like, wow. So, it's like, possible, fer sure. So, like, don't give up, people. I'm going to the mall to celebrate. (My apologies to Moon Unit Zappa).

ROS Issues

We're finding out that using your ROS Admin feature is a little trickier than we thought, and that building ROS into templates might be trickier, as well. If you're having problems with getting the right ROS options to show up, reply in the comments section and we'll try to help you (maybe your problems will help us figure out why we're having problems, too). Kind of like doing functional neuroanatomy by seeing what deficits people end up with after getting a crowbar lodged in their brain...

Some Coding Ideas

We had a conference call this morning with several folk from Greenway to go over lots of issues. One thing that came up is that for many users who are creating notes in Greenway, the codes from the note (diagnosis codes and procedure codes) do not match up with what is showing up on the paper superbill.
We will try to get some specific information about the differences so we can let each office, or maybe each doctor know, and also see if certain templates have incorrect coding information.
We are also going to develop a template with "approved" codes that you could use as a basis to develop your individual templates. In this way, you can be sure to get paid for your visit and keep things sane for the billing office. We'll go over how to start a template from another template later, but just keep that in mind.
We will also have a person or persons responsible for checking templates and making sure any coding errors get corrected, so they aren't spread throughout the system as others begin using the templates. I'm thinking that person needs to be the Template Czar, but we're open to suggestions as to the appropriate job title.
If you are in doubt about coding, try pulling codes through the Plan Wizard from the Wasatch category. Those are the ones from the superbill (although some are incorrect as well!) and should at least be easy for the B.O. to understand, and fix if necessary.

We Need Feedback on the WCP Templates

Earl and I have made two templates based on the Willow Creek parent questionnaires: a 2 week and a 2 month. We formatted them differently (on purpose) to see which people would like better.
The 2 week template incorporates the questions into a paragraph format, although it retains the same order. (One change we will probably need to make is making the breastfeeding paragraph and the formula feeding paragraph be an either/or/both option, so the final note doesn't include a junk paragraph with no selections.)
The 2 month template has the questions in bulleted form with yes/no answers, exactly as they are on the questionnaire. (One change we'll need to make is to provide fields to elaborate on the questions, such as "do you have any questions about breastfeeding" and then giving a place to enter their question).
Please help us out by trying out these two templates (and having your MA's try entering the questionnaire data for you, as well) so we can get a consensus on which style works better for people. Also take a minute to look at the finished product and see how you like the layout. Please send any comments or questions to Earl, Kevin, or as comments on this post.
Once we get some consensus on the best format, we'll go ahead and build the rest of the templates. The quicker the quicker, so try one out today and let us know what you think!

Personal EMR Milestone

Friday was the first time I did every patient for an entire day in Greenway, and I was out of the office by 6:00 (which is normal for me on Friday). As the Beatles said, "I have to admit, it's getting better, it's getting better all the time".