Benefits of Electronic Health Records Include Improved Healthcare Quality and Patient Relationships at St. Joseph Heritage and St. Jude Heritage Medical Groups

For physician Michael Gilbert, becoming a “meaningful user” of health IT was a natural extension of what his large multispecialty group had been working towards. After using EHRs for years he realized the benefits of them and wanted to take it a step further. He found the shift to becoming a meaningful user of heath IT was not just a natural transition but an important one.

Dr. Gilbert found the addition of a new clinical summary to be a stand out among the meaningful use standards.

Clinical Summaries Improve Healthcare Quality

“Rather than just meeting the word of the requirement, we built an end-of-visit event system, and the patients really have responded to it,” Dr. Gilbert said.

When he’s done visiting with a patient, Dr. Gilbert takes a moment to write up his notes in a clinical summary. Dr. Gilbert’s medical assistant then sits down with the patient to discuss the clinical summary. The follow-up gives the patient another chance to hear any instructions and recommendations and the ability to ask questions that might not have come up during the visit with the doctor, which benefits healthcare quality and patient relationships.

“It really does provide a means for the patient to have a better understanding when they leave the office,” said Dr. Gilbert.

The summary care record is one of the “menu set” items in the first stage of meaningful use standards. Providers choose five of the 10 options in the menu set. These are in addition to the required core set of 15 measures.

Dr. Gilbert acknowledges that clinical summaries have been challenging for physicians, but the benefits of electronic health records are worth it.

“This allows us to take a step back to help ensure our patients understand what we’ve told them,” Gilbert said.

Patient Relationships

Dr. Gilbert along with his physician IT champion counterpart at St. Jude Heritage Medical Group , internist Dr. Allison Foley, find themselves regularly using the EHR system’s data recall capabilities. This system allows them to track data points such as weight and blood sugar levels and follow them over time.

Using the physician’s computer workstation and the 32-inch screen on the wall of each exam room, the data points can be charted and shared with the patient. The patient can clearly see how blood sugar levels go up when weight goes up.

“It allows us to have an interactive conversation with the patient,” Foley said.

Dr. Gilbert is also a fan of the systems data recall capabilities. “The ability to share trends and engage the patient in their care is just light years above what we could do with paper,” Gilbert said.

The EHR also provides new opportunities to interact with patients. “We just launched a new patient portal,” Dr. Foley said. “It allows you to connect to patients in new ways, and share data with them that way.”

“We use our EHR to build disease registries where we can use these lists of patients, sorted by medical condition, to identify patients who may be missing important tests or therapies,” said Dr. Gilbert.

“We then direct our medical staff to call these patients, and provide them with care they were missing, women receive mammograms they may have forgotten to obtain, or diabetics’ lab tests they may have inadvertently missed.” These new tools are central to improving the care of our whole population of patients.”

Benefits Go Beyond Patients

Both doctors pointed out that in many ways the benefits of electronic health records also impact the work lives of office staff just as much as the caregivers’.

“It removed a lot of the busywork the office staff had to do. Ten years ago my medical assistant would spend two hours on the phone each day with the pharmacy sorting out and answering questions about prescribed medications,” said Dr. Gilbert. “She doesn’t spend any time on pharmacies now because it’s all handled online.”

The EHR also gives every staff member the ability to be part of the care team because of the electronic alerts and follow-ups built into the system, as everyone sees the same alerts and reminders for screenings such as colonoscopies.

“They become partners in this process of identifying the needs of patients,” Dr. Gilbert said. “They are empowered to ask the patient, did you get a referral for this screening?”

Both physicians acknowledge that the road to meaningful use has its difficult moments as physicians and staff members get used to new work processes. In some ways it was harder at St. Jude’s and St. Joseph’s because everyone had several years to get used to one way of electronically documenting information before the process was changed to report information as required by the meaningful use guidelines.

But both doctors remain staunch supporters of health IT as critical to providing prevention-oriented patient care.

“As we move into this next realm of health care with its focus on wellness and population management, EHRs allow us to look at the electronic data of our patient’s health in a multidimensional way and to compare this data over time,” Dr. Foley said. “This enables us to anticipate health problems before they occur and to be proactive partners with our patients in the management of their health; you can’t do that effectively in a paper world.”