Chandler Medical Center officials recently traveled to a conference sponsored by Mayo Clinic Jacksonville to hear what lessons officials there could share about their journey toward automation of multi-specialty clinics. Mayo officials recommended capturing baseline data such as total expenses per registration, ratio of allied health staff to total visits, ratio of paramedical to physician ratio, number of medical records support staff, patient satisfaction, physician satisfaction, and time studies. They also recommended flowcharting current processes before automation to improve process flow in concert with automation. A vendor executive is based at Mayo, where a coordinating committee of vendor and Mayo executives meet three times a year. The Department of Medicine chair, one of the project's champions, led the first clinic to go paperless at Mayo.
Physicians follow their service template when dictating.
There are no printers so they can't print. They developed different order sets to help decrease the time it takes to enter multiple orders individually. But at least it is legible, which has improved data access over the handwritten record. They are testing structured data entry for history and physicals based on chief complaint. They have menus of words or phrases that a physician selects, which actually builds the note.