While many recent reports have detailed the sometimes complex processes doctors and small medical facilities need to embark on when installing electronic medical records software, healthcare professionals indicate that this time can be beneficial in areas outside of patient care.
In a recent piece written for AAPC – one of the nation's largest medical coding certification and training institutions – Brandi Tadlock, a certified professional coder, indicated that this process can be a great opportunity for facilities to give employees a refresher course in Evaluation and Management Documentation Guidelines.
This is because while many of the facilities have their employees undergo training on the new systems, the changes in the actual documentation style of this paperwork are often overlooked. For example, Tadlock says that the new EMR system may incorporate details that are unfamiliar to workers used to using older systems.
As a result, some users could be confused about prompts for information or provide more documentation than is necessary for a particular entry, the news source says. If left unchecked, this confusion could reduce the efficiency of a medical facility and lead to wasted resources. Employees could overuse certain prompts or even enter information that was already put into the system, which may cause further errors.
To ensure that each employee is properly briefed on how to use the facility's new EMR software, doctors and IT managers may want to secure the help of a provider or Lytec EMR software that also can assist with the training process. By securing an expert outside source during this process, medical facilities could also gain the tools to use their training time as a way to revisit many of the fundamentals that workers may have let fall by the wayside.