Melanie and Robynne,
Since Bert brought up my name, I will describe our workflow. You already have some good descriptions above, and as David points out there are many ways to do this successfully.

1. Start by making every effort to minimize the paper you receive and maximize the faxes. Call your hospital lab, pathology department, radiology providers, etc. You may get some resistance at first, but ultimately they should do it because faxing is cheaper for them, too. Remember: paper is the enemy; you have to hold it, scan it, process the document, and dispose of it. Faxes are just ?there? in your PC.

2. We use Updox. Hard to describe but easy to use. It has some cost (which there are ways to reduce) but the price will likely be no more than 2-3 hours of staff time each month, and I assure you the program will save you more than that.

3. All faxes come in to the workspace in Updox. The workspace is basically like the pile of faxes in your fax machine, but it is visible to each staffer at their desk. Some docs like to go to the fax machine themselves; I tend to let the staff do the triage. Intermittently through the day they look at the workspace and handle the incoming faxes. Some are trash or junk and are thrown away. Some are auths or referrals or insurance info from patients that the staff deals with and I never see. Most are lab results, xrays, consults?.the things that I need to sign off on. They import them into AC. One of the beauties of Updox is the ease with which this takes place; no renaming of the file, no converting to a pdf?it just appears in the patient?s imported items with a minimum of clicks. More on those in a moment. A few of the faxes don?t really go in a patient?s chart but are important for me to see. They are routed to MY Updox box and I view and deal with them there.

4. Any paper results that come in are scanned into AC directly; from there they are then handled just like the results in #3, by importing into the patient?s chart in AC.

5. All of the results in #3 and #4 are brought into AC. This generates a message to me that they need to be signed off. I look at my message box regularly through the day (incoming phone messages are put there as well). When I click the message, the ?sign off screen? opens. Some require no further action; I sign off, the result is in the chart; end of story. Some require a comment, just for the record. I can put a comment on the result as I sign off on it. Some require action by staff (call and give the result; call and schedule an office visit; etc). Part of the sign off screen is a box to send a message. I select the staffer who is to receive the message, type what I want (very often using a template) and send it. Then click sign off.


We don?t use the colored tag system that David describes; I guess our workflow just doesn?t demand it.

We also don?t have any need for an additional ?sticky? system that Bert and Sandeep mention. I feel like the messages in AC do exactly the same thing for us.

Robynne, you ask ?Is there another way to inform our MA's of results with AC other than sending/attaching a message in the signing off process??. What do you have in mind; what aspect of this do they object to? I guess I don?t see why this is a labor intensive process.

One other general point: I remember hearing someone talk about efficient paper handling and organizational skills. The speaker suggested that a goal is to have each piece of paper (mail, etc) be handled only once. So when a fax comes in, your goal should be to look at it, handle it, ?.and never have to deal with it again. That is obviously not always possible but is a reasonable objective to keep in mind.



Jon
GI
Baltimore

Reduce needless clicks!