Veradigm EHR and DocBuddy, Help Providers Spend Less Time on Documentation and More Time on Patient Care
Featured Client Story
Spending too much of the day on administrative tasks in the electronic health record (EHR) or on documentation, and not enough time on actual patient care, is a common complaint among today’s clinicians. In a recent survey, 36% of clinicians reported spending more than half their working time on administrative tasks within their EHRs; in the same study, 72% of responding clinicians reported the expectation that the time required for EHR administrative tasks would increase over the next 12 months.
Many physicians perceive medical documentation as an onerous responsibility, believing it detracts from the face-to-face time they have available to spend with their patients. Many believe documentation is a significant driver of physician burnout. In a 2019 study evaluating the responses of office-based physicians to the National Electronic Health Record Survey, researchers found that 58.1% of respondents disagreed that the amount of time spent on documentation was appropriate and felt it reduced the amount of time they had to spend with patients.
In this same study, researchers found that physicians who used EHRs spent a mean of 1.84 hours per day on documentation outside of office hours. This was significantly more time than physicians without EHRs, who spent a mean of 1.10 hours per day on documentation outside of regular office hours.
This was one of the challenges faced by clinicians at the Orthopedic Centers of Colorado (OCC) when they decided to switch to the Veradigm EHR shortly after the group was formed from 8 separately owned orthopedic practices in the Denver, CO area.
Commonly faced ambulatory challenges
The OCC’s goal was to bring the best quality of care at scale to orthopedic patients in the Denver, CO, region. However, like many ambulatory practices, OCC’s group members struggled with spending too much of their days on documentation and not enough time on patient care. Although they employed a transcription service to help accelerate the documentation process, this transcription service generated numerous errors—which required additional time from clinicians because they had to go back into patient charts to correct their patients’ information.
They also found that only one OCC member could make changes to a patient’s chart at any given time. Charting was such a slow, time-consuming process that the resulting delays in documentation were significantly frustrating for every provider and nurse on the OCC team.
The OCC team includes over 150 orthopedic surgeons, doctors, and allied health specialists serving at 19 separate clinic locations in the Denver, CO, area. They required a solution to facilitate portability between the Veradigm EHR and their previous technology. At the same time, they required a solution that would help their clinicians to save time during documentation, but without adding errors during the process.
This paper recounts OCC’s successful collaboration with Veradigm, using a Veradigm Connect Certified App to facilitate their cross-clinic implementation of the Veradigm Suite of solutions. This app, known as DocBuddy, is integrated with the Veradigm EHR mobile solution to provide time-saving functions such as:
- The ability to dictate patient notes while another provider is also accessing the patient’s chart
- The ability to chart directly from the provider’s phone/mobile device
- Increasing transcription accuracy from the previously used solution, even for uncommon orthopedic terms
- The ability to access patient records, provider schedules, and portals for documenting a variety of provider-specific information
- Seamless integration with text shortcuts and templates to streamline documentation
Learn how Veradigm not only met OCC’s immediate EHR and Practice Management needs but also connected OCC’s team members with a trusted partner whose technology made the transition proceed more efficiently, more quickly, and with fewer documentation errors.