Electronic Medical Records (EMR) adoption is a national concern. President Obama’s ARRA stimulus and HITECH Act provides $44,000 incentives for clinicians who adopt EMR technology. Last year, a New England Journal of Medicine survey indicated that only 4% of clinicians have a fully functional EMR (with order-entry and clinical-decision support capabilities) and only 13% have a basic system.
If outpatient healthcare organizations and private clinicians are unsuccessful in the deployment of EMR technology, how will health information be exchanged between healthcare organizations and personal health records universally supported? At as more basic level, if documenting patient encounters through EMR technology slows clinicians down from conventional practice, how can widespread adoption be practically anticipated? How might this loss of efficiency impact the “meaningful use” requirements?
Electronic Medical Records (EMR) adoption is a national concern. President Obama’s ARRA stimulus and HITECH Act provides $44,000 incentives for clinicians who adopt EMR technology. Last year, a New England Journal of Medicine survey indicated that only 4% of clinicians have a fully functional EMR (with order-entry and clinical-decision support capabilities) and only 13% have a basic system.
Since the emergence of EMR technology, many EMR companies have taken aim at medical transcription as a costly and obsolete part of healthcare documentation. In reality healthcare documentation continues to depend significantly on the work of medical transcriptionists while the Medical Transcription Industry Association (MTIA) continues to retool the next generation of “knowledge workers” trained in specialized crafts such as backend speech recognition editing, Discrete Reportable Transcription (DRT), Clinical Documentation Improvement (CDI), E&M coding review audit, risk management review audit and other services inherently linked to healthcare documentation.
As noted by the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) in a Practice Brief entitled Speech Recognition in the Electronic Health Record, Efficient clinical documentation practices are historically based on narrative dictation. When clinicians are asked to change these habits and engage technology rather than patients, they not only incur the cost of the technology, they incur the cost of their lost time and the cost the distraction this effort has on the intimacy and quality of the patient encounter. In many cases they incur the cost of how their own clerical restraints impact the quality of documentation, which may lead to risk management issues, inaccurate or incomplete coding for treatment and reimbursement, and other problems. “MTs are poised to evolve into clinical data, data quality, and decision support specialists.”
