The Affordable Care Act included incentives and subsidies to encourage health care providers to switch to electronic medical records. The idea was to make it easier to navigate the growing complexity of the healthcare landscape, to shorten the amount of time it takes to look up old medical records, and to allow different hospitals and clinics to easily locate a patient’s complete record even if the patient in question had never set foot in the building before.
However, ask almost any doctor in America and they’ll tell you that reality has not lived up to the promises. The records software is often cumbersome, hard to use, and hard to master, and it often doesn’t want to talk to different databases at different medical facilities because they went with a different software company.
There’s also the fact that some software companies are pushing through complicated, unfair contracts that demand extra fees for every sort of communication. That means fees for sharing information with other facilities, and even fees for sending patients a text message reminder. Small practices who don’t retain contract lawyers are the ones being hit particularly hard by these practices.
Fortunately, while the government isn’t doing much to help, it seems like these predatory practices are already on their way out. The technology that goes into EMR software isn’t hard to duplicate, which means that the competition level is quickly improving. That, in turn, means that clinics and hospitals can choose a favorable contract instead of accepting the first and worst option.
Another way that both small practices and major hospitals alike can improve productivity at a bargain is by hiring medical scribes through ProScribe. Our professional and fully qualified medical assistants can take on the paperwork that comes with a modern medical practice so that the doctors and nurses can spend more of their time speaking with and caring for their patients. Not only does this improve both doctor and patient satisfaction levels, medical scribes can also improve productivity to the point where our services can pay for themselves.
