Home Forums Discussions Meaningful Use Clinical summary 50% requirement

I'm having an issue with the clincial summary, #13 of the core requirements. We're supposed to have these on 50% of visits. I do them routinely on nearly 100% by clicking the print instructions button, and printing them up front by my receptionist, but have noticed that if I do not completely finish and sign the note in the room with the patient, and instead <CTL S> it to my inbox to finish later, the fact that I did the clinical summary earlier doesn't "stick".

If I go back to finish and sign the chart say 4 hrs or 24 hrs later, after the patient has left with their useful little summary in hand, and I click on the meaningful use checkup box to see which green checkmarks I have, very often the clinical summary check isn't there. Even though I did it when the patient was in the office. I often have to print another one (or at least generate one to preview, and then close it, which actually does give you credit for this I have found) in order to get credit for core 13.

Has anyone else noticed this? I have discovered a couple of cheats whereby the system can be fooled into thinking a summary has in fact been printed, when it hasn't, but I would like to get credit for the ones that I actually am doing, in real time.

Thanks,

I had a similar problem with clinical summaries and spent a lot of time with tech support about this. What I have found was that unless the note was signed it did not pick up med changes or resolved problems and so since I rarely complete and sign the note when I have just finished seeing the patient, the CCD is not accurate.
I have to say I was not aware that it does not count the CCD if you have the chart in your in box.
overall, I think that the CCD is not a very useful document for me but I suppose that we have to do it for MU.
bala

I successfully attested to MU and had no problem meeting the Clinical Summaries criteria. I almost never finished my note before printing the Summary. I would just finish the Plan, then print it. I have it set to print the CCD but do not give it to patients as it is a useless and confusing document for many patients in my practice.

I have not been able to reproduce this issue.
I routinely send notes to my inbox to finish a few minutes later.
I am in the attestation process, and I'm at 97% compliant with core #13.

PS, I never print this summary to patients.
It's confusing for them to understand, heck I can barely make useful sense out of it. So I print preview it, then close the screen. This makes it "count" toward the MU measure. Maybe that's why mine records always records it, b/c I'm NOT printing it. who knows....

I believe it has something to do with the 3-day window for providing the summary to the patient.

I was able to reproduce the issue:
If you see a patient, and during the visit print them the summary/CCD you can look at the MU status (top right button) and it will show you the passing grade for Core 13... until 12:00am that night. If you leave the unfinished note in your inbox, and go to finish it the next calendar day, the status will show incomplete Core 13, unless you "print" one again... in which case you'll then get credit, but that credit will be applied to the date it was signed, whereas the rest of the Cores are applied to the date of the visit.
If you finish notes after midnight, then run a MU Wizard report for just that date (the date of 12:01 am), you'll have a numerator of however many notes you signed (if you "re-printed" the summary as above), but a denominator of zero (until you see more patients, or more precisely "sign chart notes", that date).

I also print very few encounters for patients. I do for those that have had an annual or complete exam. I think the inclusion of all the inactive meds and the inactive diagnoses is very messy and makes the whole thing very difficult to understand. Like Adam, I print preview and then close. I just attested successfully.

My biggest problem is that I do not use AC for billing but there are some CQMs that are not counted unless the encounter is "billed". So had to go back and put in billing cpt's on a bunch of encounters and then assign a 0 charge for those cpt's. Luckily, I only had to do it on about 30 patients to get my numbers.

I found the same problem leslie.
I don't us AC billing either, so I stopped reporting on those measures that require entering billing charge to register the data.