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Optimization Services: Make a Difference in 2021!

19 January 2021
Blog

eClinicalWorks

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How training can move practices from good to great

How many times have you bought a fancy new gadget, set it up, and then sort of learned how to use it? Probably quite a few. But if you’re a medical practitioner and the “gadget” is your Electronic Health Record, “sort of” learning the system simply isn’t good enough.

Sure, after the challenge and excitement of a Go-Live has faded, many practices manage to get by on the knowledge they pick up through daily use and an occasional training session. Problems are handled as they arise. The job gets done. Physicians and staff are mostly happy.

But with a little help from eClinicalWorks Optimization Services, your practice can go from just getting by to recapturing the excitement of your Go-Live while fulfilling the promise of your EHR. That can mean faster workflows, less risk of provider burnout, better delivery of care, and a more financially sustainable practice.

Why a Pennsylvania practice chose eCW for optimization

For Hyndman Area Health Center, a 17-provider practice with three locations in Pennsylvania, conducting a review of their EHR operations every year or two is vital for ensuring the quality and continuity of care they provide.

Since we’ve been using eClinicalWorks, it has helped us with our quality improvement,” said CEO William Kurtycz. “With Transition Care Management, Chronic Care Management, and daily population visits, we’ve seen improvement of 25% on average.”

Kurtycz explains how enabling healow TeleVisits^™ was one of the key moves the practice made, particularly during the past year, given the disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Having a reliable solution for remote patient care has helped maintain continuity.

Three choices for optimizing performance

But for every practice that undertook a quality improvement initiative in recent months, there were many others who found themselves working harder just to keep up with patients’ needs — never mind thinking about fine-tuning their EHR.

So, as things begin to settle down in 2021, it’s worth taking a closer look at what your practice might do to make daily workflows a little easier.

Once you’re ready to consider optimizing the EHR you rely upon each day, eClinicalWorks is there with a choice of approaches.

We always start with a kickoff call that lays out what we can do, followed by a discovery site visit and report.

From there, practices that engage our optimization experts can take one of three paths:

A do-it-yourself approach in which the practice works to address gaps in performance.
A hybrid approach in which eClinicalWorks recommends superuser training based on the gaps the practice wants to address.
A comprehensive eClinicalWorks option in which our experts provide all the training needed — for superusers and end users alike — to address all identified gaps.

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What if you’re still not quite ready?

Our experts have long experience working with practices of all kinds, and the kinds of challenges they face usually center on things like more efficient check-in (critical during the ongoing pandemic!), booking, e-payments, daily workflows, management of prescriptions, and the use of templates, Order Sets, and dashboards.

But if you think you could use some help but you’re still not sure exactly where to begin, what might you do?

Well, the quickest path forward is to contact your Strategic Account Manager and initiate the process for having a discovery call with our experts. Their job isn’t to push a given solution on your practice, but to gain a deeper understanding of what is working well, what could be improved, and where gaps in care might exist. They work with you to deepen your understanding of the value of optimization.

Before you know it, you’ll have a complete to-do list in your hands and will be well on your way to a more efficient and effective EHR — including some items you might never have thought of.

Check out a report on common challenges

Perhaps, however, you’re a person that likes to think things over and gather some additional perspectives before you even pick up the phone.

If that’s you, why not take a few minutes to read this August 2020 paper from the National Academy of Medicine? It is an excellent overview of how to think about balancing performance and physician well-being. It includes a point-by-point review of the EHR that can help you and your colleagues focus your thinking and discussions on what areas of your practice might benefit from a bit more attention.

Want to learn more about how eClinicalWorks can help? Check out our podcast From Go-Live to Optimizing Your EHR, or call your SAM today. Or sign up today at our Customer Portal, my.eclinicalworks.com, for a free webinar that explains everything Optimization Services can do for you. Whenever you’re ready, eClinicalWorks experts are there to help tailor a program to meet your exact needs.