Clerks, scribes and transcriptionists will input the data. The immediate payoff for physicians will be the ability to access information electronically from their office, home or the hospital. Eventually, Hager predicts, physicians will use computers to enter encounter data and consult formularies and guidelines at the point of care as they become more comfortable with electronic records and as technologies such as touch screens, flat screens, hand-held computers, handwriting recognition and speech recognition improve. That will give us better data and more immediate access. Although most practice-management systems were designed for billing and later adapted to the clinical setting, BigVision was designed first and foremost as a clinical information system.
Billing is the final funnel point of information.
In 1992, when Dr. Lowenstein decided to computerize medical records at the Orlando group, no clinically oriented systems were commercially available. So he hired a system developer to create a patient data system. The result was BigVision, now widely implemented at several Orlando sites and also a commercial product. The main reason MAM selected BigVision from more than two dozen alternatives is that it is clinically oriented, Hager says. You can't study and compare practice patterns or negotiate contracts based on claims data, although many companies try.