Family Practice Streamlines Office Workflows and Improves Patient Care with EHR
Cal Arundel Family Medicine is a solo private practice in Maryland specializing in family medicine. Run by Dr. Stan Wisniewski and his wife, Mary Louise, the practice is dedicated to improving the lives of patients and their families by taking a holistic approach to care.
Cal Arundel Family Medicine’s story demonstrates that electronic health record (EHR) systems don’t have to be complicated to implement and learn, or force physicians to change the way they practice medicine. By adopting the right EHR system, this solo practice gained rewards that positively impact patient care and its bottom line.
The Issue
Before overseeing his own practice, Dr. Stan Wisniewski worked in a large group practice that used paper charts. He was frustrated not only by the traditional charts, but by the fact that he often saw patients for acute visits without any chart at all. In 2006, Dr. Wisniewski and his wife, Mary Louise, began running Cal Arundel Family Medicine. As a self-proclaimed paper hater and someone who recognized the inherent benefits of utilizing a clinical information system for his practice and his patients, Dr. Wisniewski began the move to an EHR that same year. His first attempt was with a basic charting program, but he soon found the system limiting, inefficient and hard to modify or customize to his practice. This initial experience left him concerned that his practice would need to change in order to fit the constraints of existing, out-of-the-box solutions.
Following his first experience with automated charts, Dr. Wisniewski focused on getting a new billing system up and running. Dr. Wisniewski had been using an outside billing company that required his office to prepare and send a “superbill” every day—doubling their work load. Once the new billing systems was live, he sought an EHR to complete the move to paperless and was determined, from the outset, to find a system that was simple to deploy, intuitive to use and flexible enough to adjust to the workflow of his practice (instead of the other way around).
The Solution
After a thorough search, Dr. Wisniewski selected Sequel Systems to help the practice make the critical move toward a comprehensive EHR.
Other vendors would have required Dr. Wisniewski to accept a basic layout or pay extra for a custom product. Sequel Systems offers a unique implementation strategy characterized not by a wholesale, overnight move to a new system, but instead by a tiered or phased approach whereby users are steadily acclimated to new processes while the technology itself is customized to meet the unique needs and workflow of the practice. Dr. Wisniewski and his staff worked closely with Sequel Systems to customize the EHR to their routine and workflow and to accommodate the diverse patients, complaints, diagnoses and treatments required on a daily basis by a family practice. Cal Arundel worked with Sequel Systems to develop customized templates and functionality designed specifically for the organization.
SequelMed EHR is an all-in-one, fully integrated solution that combines the power of practice management, document management and medical records solutions. This combination of billing, documents and imaging, and medical records helps Dr. Wisniewski capture and manage episodic and longitudinal health records information, automate and streamline the practice’s workflow, and carefully monitor patient activity from administrative, financial and clinical points of view.
