The implementation of the EHRs has fundamentally altered coding workflow, and has made HIM directors look for new ways to be efficient.
In part two of my interview with Diann Brown, we discussed the priorities of an HIM director. In Diann’s case, she focused first and foremost on her employees and on her revenue cycle numbers.
In today’s installment, Diann talks about some of HIM’s greatest challenges.
When I asked Diann about the challenges facing HIM, I thought she’d say something about ICD-10 or the increasing number of government audits, but her answer surprised me: “The implementation of electronic health records,” she said.
Now, ICD-10 and government audits are definitely concerns, and Diann’s department is doing all they can to be prepared. But EHRs are fundamentally changing the way she and her staffers work.
“The biggest thing in HIM is workflow,” Diann said. “I always want to be efficient. We don’t have time or the staffing to do things two and three times.”
The implementation of the EHR in her hospital has made Diann and her management staff look for new ways to be efficient. For instance, getting rid of paper records also meant her employees no longer had visual cues. A tall stack of records on a coder’s desk, for instance, signaled to the coder that she needed to buckle down and get rid of her backlog. Without that stack of files, Diann’s team has developed tools such as daily reports to bring the coding backlog back into view.
Besides workflow, the move to electronic records is causing more and more organizations—Texas Health Resources included—to move towards centralization. Just this year, Texas Health centralized its transcription services. Using software from Nuance, transcriptionists do less traditional transcription and more transcript editing. And the results of their new transcription model were immediate.
“We saw a huge increase in productivity,” Diann said, “and we were able to decrease turnaround time, which was even more important.”
My takeaway from today’s article: New technology can make things better, but it can also have unintended or unanticipated consequences.
In tomorrow’s article, we’ll discuss an HIM director’s view on vendors.
Photo credit: Darwin Bell, (cc)
