Integrated EHR / Practice Management Solution Is A Win-Win In Specialty Practice

Women's Health Advantage (WHA) is Fort Wayne and Northeast Indiana's largest OB-GYN practice, with 31 providers in seven locations administering 242,000 annual patient visits. In 2002, WHA implemented a rudimentary system, basically an electronic version of a paper chart, consisting of transcribed word documents and scanned or hand-entered diagnostic testing results. There was a functional OB flow sheet, but only limited data points for reporting, mainly medications and allergies, and the system was unable to mine clinical data. Dictation would add one to two hours to the provider's day, which had a negative impact on quality of life.

WHA also felt that its paper "encounter forms" for coding and charging created two areas of lost revenue. First, WHA knew its services were skewed to the lower coding levels, but as a specialty practice, the opposite should have been true. The second area was lost charges; charges the provider neither accounted for in their dictation nor on the encounter form. For these reasons, WHA initiated a search for a comprehensive, fully integrated electronic health record and practice management solution.