EMR is Good, But Here’s How You Can Make it Even Better

Those who took the digital step can likely say that Electronic Medical Records (EMR) have changed the way their clinics operate for the better. One of the principal benefits of EMR is the elimination of paper charts — stacks and stacks of paper charts. EMR has paved the way for healthcare providers to record and provide information in ways that paper-based records could never achieve. Because of EMR, providers and patients can now have more informed, efficient, and meaningful interactions.

EMR have facilitated the refashioning of many practices into the future, but what it does best can also be its worst. At best, EMR works, but it also means more work. The point is, for EMR to to be beneficial, you need to spend time with it. Office staff that are meant to be the first line of patient service need to spend time with EMR (to the accompaniment of administrative tasks), time that could have been spent providing direct, personal, and prompt care to patients.

But what if you don’t have to?

Third party, remote staffing partners such as DrCatalyst help clinics overcome this issue. At a fraction of an on-site employee’s operating cost, remote staffing adds more hands to do the job, allowing clinics to overcome administrative burdens, finicky EMR tasks, and slow clinical operations. In this scenario, remote staff basically do the heavy lifting, while the clinic’s staff can focus on what they do best — providing patient care.

With highly trained remote employees, DrCatalyst handles — on behalf of on-site staff — tasks such as insurance collections, referral and authorization tracking, scheduling, transcription, billing, and many more. With the highest level of security and accuracy, DrCatalyst streamlines front office and back office operations so that on-site staff may never have to deal with the complexities of EMR and the modern health care system, and so that they can go back to treating patients at their own pace.

Not sure how this works? With intensive training on HIPAA compliance, the remote staff access the clinic’s devices remotely to do all the clerical, billing, and support work; leaving staff and providers with minimal EMR duties and maximum face time with patients. Picture this: when front desk staff schedule patients, the authorizations, documents, or insurance information are already retrieved and prepared ahead of time by the remote staff. When patients call in for appointment scheduling, remote staff take care of the back-and-forth communications. When physicians see their patients, they don’t have to be pressured by EMR documentation, they can maintain eye contact with the patient while a voice recorder runs so that the remote transcriptionists can provide the transcripts of the patient visit later.

For practices of all shapes and sizes, remote staffing can be instrumental in building a more patient-centric workflow, where value-based healthcare and patient engagement are two of the most important values that make clinics stay relevant. So, ready to give remote staffing a try? A detailed overview of DrCatalyst might help in understanding the benefits of remote staffing better. Check out the video below.