Please forgive me. I'm not sure what you're referring to.
It is
indeed sad that we just can't use whatever documentation tools we use to care for our patients without worry about proving who did what. However, we live in a litigious world, and most of us have read mailings from our malpractice carriers chronicling disastrous consequences of not acting on information we've received (abnormal mammograms, dangerously low hematocrits, elevated calciums, potassiums, BUNs,
etc.)
As soon as an individual becomes part of a group, there will be differences in style - documentation, work habits, personal mental filing cabinets, whatever. Unless there's a way to track who has seen what and who has acted on what there's enormous potential not just for misattributed negligence liability but also for information not to be found easily.
Most of the EHRs I've looked at that are designed to be used by groups bring data from labs, imaging centers, etc. into a PRACTICE inbox that's monitored by a staffer. That person works from defined lists of "panic values" for labs before placing ANYTHING in the designated doc's inbox. There's a precise analogy to the paper-based office, where all incoming correspondence, reports, etc. are viewed by a staffer and distributed manually.
It seems to me that it wouldn't take a huge amount of coding to modify Amazing Charts so that there could be such a shared inbox for the practice as a whole. A real person would see everything that comes in; the software would record how he/she handled it. If there's a lab report for doc A, but he's away, the screener would route it to the covering doc, and the software would record who has processed it.
Of course, the doc who ordered the study will want to know the result, so he should see, when he returns from vacation, that the covering doc has seen the report, and ideally, there'd be an interface in the software for the covering doc to annotate the report if he did anything with it other than look at it).
In our paper based office of four docs we have little trouble tracking these things, because we sign reports when we review them, route them to the vacationing doc's "review when you return" inbasket if we're covering for a partner, and attach notes that become part of the chart if we do anything with the report other than attest that we've looked at it.
I most respectfully submit that an electronic workflow that's decidedly inferior to that ("just log in as the vacationing doc") is unacceptable. The notion "the vacationing doc couldn't have seen this and ignored it, because he was thousands of miles away, so just look at the practice schedule to see who was covering" is wrong on two fronts: first, people have suggested in this thread that the vacationing doc COULD just use LogMeIn to do exactly that; second, the burden of retrieving an accessible record of "who covered when" months or perhaps even years later (outside the EHR/practice management software) defeats one of the main purposes of using a robust database to record what we do.
I want to love this product, because it "nails it" in so many ways as regards how docs work, and so many EHRs are NOT designed by people who actually do what we do.
Thanks so much.
