We have had IMH for a little over a year I think. (time flies when your having fun?) We have access to IMH on our website and we have three workstations that are set up to allow a patient to sit down and complete the questions. New patients are directed to the web site when they call to make an appointment and when they arrive in the office we ask if they completed the questionaire. If they have not, we direct them to the terminal while they are waiting to be seen. If I am ready to see them before they are finished, I simply rescue them from the computer and escort them to the room myself. (If my next patient is ready I see them instead).
I love IMH, my partners are lukewarm about it. I have it set to show me ALL responses, positive and negative. I feel I need a lot of experience with it, before I will feel comfortable telling it to hide the negative responses. This means the output on a new patient or a pre-op patient is very long with lots and lots of "denied" this and that. That is what my partners don't like, but I feel we still need it. I also like documenting that these questions were asked.
IMH does an amazing job of interviewing, moving through algorithms that allow it to tailor the questions to the patient. It gives a final report WITH CITATIONS TO THE JOURNAL ARTICLES THAT SUPPORT THE USE OF THE QUESTIONNAIRES UTILIZED IN THAT ALGORITHM. It may notify you the patient has a 1 in 4 chance of an event of CHF based on some study, or it will rate the depression with the ZUNG scale or alcohol with the MAST scale. Very cool stuff.
IMH is NOT PLUG AND PLAY. You need to set it up. Left on it's own, every patient will endure a several hour interrogation. YOU have the ability to strengthen or weaken the question for each purpose. This is easily accomplished by sliding a bar on a scale in each organ system or in each part of any special exams you use. For example we have a pre-op exam. It has the cardiac and pulmonary questionnaire turned way up. The rest of the ros is turned to a medium level. For my geriatric questionaire, I have the obstetrical history turned WAY down, (ie, do you have children?) as I am not going to dwell on the hours of labor of each successive pregnancy.
I feel IMH is well worth the investment, but you have to work with it and make it work for you, then you have to use it.
