“This board is excellent. This stuff has very little to do with AC really.”
So true, Travis! It is somehow satisfying for me to sit in the small office of my big city, East Coast practice and identify so closely with the challenges facing a solo Arkansas surgeon. There are so many similarities in the issues we sweat about on a daily basis; both the big ones and the little ones. It is equally gratifying to watch others from across the country pitch in with so much thought and energy to try to help with those problems. AC is part of the picture, and this forum is “all about” AC, but it does go way beyond that. Without sounding too dramatic, it is good for the soul.
You have already gotten lots of great suggestions. Let me offer two, one “macro” and one “micro”. First of all, looking at your overall schedule, I would suggest that we are not magicians; we can’t manufacture time. You schedule new patients for 20 minutes and follow-ups for 10. You (admirably) are insistent on staying on time. I would suggest that is impossible! How long do you spend talking to the patients and examining them, as well as ordering tests, explaining surgeries, and plain-old handholding? If you want to stay on time, I would bet that you have roughly NO time to do your charting. So when you say “I also don't want to make new patients 30 minutes just because of my EMR,” I would suggest that the EMR is not the real issue. Sure, it helps to have an excellent EMR (like we do), and the staff utilization and document management suggestions are invaluable, but you can’t create something from nothing. In other words, I think you need to rearrange your schedule. The choices, as I see them: add time to the visits (e.g. if it takes 10 minutes to chart a new patient, make the slots 30 minutes); or do your charting later. What you don’t want is for “later” to mean days later when the patient shows up for surgery. What it could mean is at the end of that day, or the end of the session. So if you now schedule mornings from 8-noon, change it to 8-11 and leave an hour for charting. Or end your day an hour and a half earlier and do the charting then. Or, worst case, stay late and do all the charts at night. If it were me, I would lengthen the visit times, but that is just my 2 cents. Bottom line: there are only so many hours in the day, and though the work eventually all gets done, why not rearrange the schedule so you don’t feel perpetually behind?
My “micro” suggestion is ShortKeys. I have already run afoul of Bert in this thread (or really, you did…I didn’t try to claim credit for one of his ideas…you just gave it to me). So I must preface this by saying “Bert recommends ShortKeys”. On the other hand, I have been using it for years, way before I ever heard of AC (or of Bert). Yes, templates are wonderful and I use them all the time. But nothing beats the satisfaction, for example, of typing “nlmpe” and getting the full paragraph of a normal male physical exam. And it is quicker than right-clicking, finding the template, clicking it, and entering it (ok, not by much, but still, I like it better). Plus, as a consultant, all your regular referring docs have abbreviations, too. So you type “JS” and you get “John Smith, M.D.”….an even bigger bonus if “JS” is “Dr. Jennifer Smithfield-Johnson”. There a million ways to use this inexpensive program, and every time I use it, it feels good. You are only limited by the number of shortcuts you can remember (you can pull up a list, or hints, but that reduces the fun and the time saving).
Oh, and in my office, we have NO girls…all the people who work with me are women. :-)
Last edited by JBS; 03/03/2010 1:36 AM.
