Resistance is futile Scared of progress? Resistant to change? Not the docs in our survey.
Alan Grimes, a primary-care physician in Kansas City, raves about his tech-enabled practice: “We have had great success with our EMR [from e-MDs] … and have had fantastic patient acceptance and appreciation. We have also managed our time significantly better and reduced the hassles of our healthcare environment locally by using a fax server rather than a fax machine. This virtually eliminates refaxing items from our end and eliminates busy signals from other offices.”
Internist Samuel Purpura of Southampton, Pa., says his office is “essentially paperless,” and the benefits he’s reaped from his EMR are “too numerous to name them all.” But he does articulate several. “I can provide patients with their test results very quickly, coordinate their care even from home, check for drug interactions at the point of care, fax their prescriptions to the pharmacy, [and] review the patients’ health alerts based on age and diagnosis easily,” he says. “The system allows me to keep my overhead very low. This subsequently allows me to spend more time with my patients. I believe this is reflected in my recent office patient satisfaction survey, in which my patients rated my office overall with a 98.6 percent satisfaction score.”
And then there are the Mehtas. Nearly three years after quitting their jobs and launching their own practice together, they’ve discovered that it is indeed possible to make ends meet
and practice old-fashioned medicine — but not, perhaps, without help from newfangled technology.
The Mehtas opened their practice with no employees save themselves. Although they have since hired some part-time staff, the physicians themselves handle most of the practice’s administrative tasks.
The Mehtas knew their strategy would create challenges even as it saved them money. That’s why they decided that their practice would have an EMR from day one, even though neither had ever worked with one before. Today they credit their EMR as a key reason for their success. “It was really hard,” says Nemishh, but “the EMR does help quite a lot.”
Running the new practice with an EMR from its inception, rather than adding the technology to an existing practice, has made implementation much easier, says Nemishh. For one thing, there were no conversion issues to deal with — no paper to scan, no work processes to be revamped, no resistant physicians or employees to be trained. And the initial lean period new practices typically experience when they open — seeing only a handful of patients a day — did provide an opportunity to spend time learning the system.
Nemishh Mehta’s favorite EMR feature is an independent online forum for eClinicalWorks users like himself, where he can get unvarnished advice and share tips with other users and prospective buyers. The forum, eCWusers.com, is run by a physician user rather than the company (although its officials visit the site and offer their views and suggestions). Nemishh says that makes him feel he can trust that the views expressed in the forum are authentic.
“I’m on here seven times a day,” he says. “In fact, I have it on my screen right now. It’s a place where you can get support and advice — and it’s a place where people can commiserate.” (eClinicalWorks isn’t the only EMR vendor whose clients have formed an online community. A simple Google search will help you determine if there’s a user forum specific to your EMR, or one you’re considering purchasing.)
