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- As the health system increasingly recognizes the growing importance of chronic disease prevention and management, family physicians are seeing a proliferation of clinic practice guidelines. You want to ensure that your patients are receiving the best care, meeting or exceeding these standards, but there is so much information and it keeps changing. How do you keep track? And how do you know how well you really are doing in meeting care guidelines?
- This is a very difficult process with paper charts, but tremendously easier with an electronic medical record (EMR) system. A good EMR will help by:
- Allowing you to identify which patients have a condition to which clinical practice guidelines apply.
- Capturing the information necessary to assess how well you are complying with each guideline.
- Providing an easy, condition-specific view of your patient data, to filter out the “background noise” and answer questions like “how many of my diabetic patients are receiving the care specified in the diabetes guidelines.”
- Allowing you to set up reminders for patient visits so they are seen within the time period specified by the guideline.
- Making it easy to provide patients with education and self-management advice appropriate to their condition, by setting up and printing information sheets.
- In addition, a qualified EMR system will support the data capture and interfaces necessary for you to qualify for programs that reward the demonstration of quality care, such as the Physician Integrated Network (PIN) program.
- Physicians should be able to focus on individual patients rather than having to remember and apply simple rules with absolute consistency – something software is very good at. Let an EMR do what it is good at, allowing physicians to concentrate on what they do best!
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