Cleveland, MD: Doctor's Orders
Type “Electronic Medical Record” (EMR) into Google. Within seconds it returns 97,100,000 results. Discussion boards, blogs, price lists, comparison charts, reviews, and the home pages of dozens of companies offering products that automate the practice of medicine appear. For doctors considering the switch from a paper chart to automated records and practice management tools, this is clearly a hot topic.
Dr. Craig Cleveland should know. After eight years directing an occupational therapy center in Cincinnati, Ohio, he decided once again to return to a solo medical practice similar to one he started in 1984. Because he was starting fresh, he wanted to take advantage of current technology as much as possible.
“I knew the overhead of managing a medical office would be a big issue,” Dr. Cleveland says. “So I wanted to keep the burden of management as low as possible.” High on his list of productivity tools? EMR and practice management solutions running on a Macintosh.
The cost of using a typical EMR doesn’t come cheap. “You can spend between $50,000 and $200,000” on an EMR and practice management solution on a PC-platform.” That’s an enormous expense for a doctor worrying about recouping the costs. Plus, Dr. Cleveland says, “Managing an EMR on the PC is too complicated. You need an IT department to set it up and perform upgrades.”
Instead, when Dr. Cleveland opened his doors in July of 2005, with a practice specializing in workers compensation, he chose to run SpringCharts EMR and MacPractice MD billing and practice management software on the Mac.
Four Rooms, Three Computers
Located in a soccer sports complex in Mason Ohio, a suburb of Cincinnati, Dr. Cleveland runs his practice from four exam rooms and a procedure room in 1,200 square feet of office space he shares with Sports Therapy, Inc, a physical therapy provider, and an orthopedic physician. With just one medical assistant/radiology technician and a shared receptionist, Dr. Cleveland attends to the needs of a variety of patients with acute and chronic work injuries and numerous return-to-work and pre-operative examinations.
“In my medical office,” Dr. Cleveland says, ”I have three computers, a printer, Microsoft Office, EMR and practice management billing, plus iWork, iListen, and AirPort Extreme wireless networking, and all that equipment was less expensive than the lowest cost solution for a single user running on a PC.”
The cost? Dr. Cleveland reports, “All the software I need to run EMR and a practice management solution on the Mac cost $6,000. And that’s for three clients.”
The Way a Doctor Thinks
What do you get for that kind of money? Turns out you get a full featured EMR that works “exactly the way a doctor thinks,” Dr. Cleveland says. “SpringCharts is designed around a series of screens with intuitive menus that follow the way you practice medicine.”
“Let’s say a patient comes into the office with complaints like sore throat, fever, and rash. The first thing you do is enter the symptoms in the EMR. Go to ‘present illness’ and the three problems are visible all the time. So there is no forgetting the presenting symptoms you want to address.”
“Next,” Dr. Cleveland says, “You go to ‘review systems,’ and the program steps you through a very thorough checklist of vitals, physical exam, and diagnosis. It’s intuitively designed to follow the way physicians think and actually improves interaction with patients. “The best thing about using an EMR solution is its accuracy,” Dr. Cleveland states. “We want an accurate recording of what we are doing. So when a patient comes in on a subsequent visit we have an accurate record of what we did previously.
Dr. Cleveland is quick to list the additional advantages of computerizing a medical office. “Streamlined billing, better patient and doctor communication, and faster reimbursement from insurance companies. “We need good documentation of the services we provide,” he says. “We need to be efficient when we code our services, and we need documentation to support our coding.”
When it comes to communication, speed is of the essence. With a computerized practice management solution, “Insurance companies get communications instantly,” Dr. Cleveland reports. “With a single button click I can copy an office note and send it off to an insurance company. That enhances my ability to get reimbursement.”
