This article was originally posted on hitconsultant.net.
Phoenix Children’s Hospital’s outpatient clinics has increased clinician productivity, enhanced the quality of documentation, and facilitated the delivery of better clinical information at the point of care through the implementation of Medicomp Systems’ Quippe Clinical Documentation solution.
In addition, Phoenix Children’s has virtually eliminated transcription in its ambulatory clinics, saving the organization over $1 million dollars annually on transcription costs.
A strong partnership between clinicians and IT leadership was also key to the success of this initiative at Phoenix Children’s. Physicians in the pediatric rheumatology division worked closely with the IT team to create templates that capture disease-specific details on patients with juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA). That data is then fed to Phoenix Children’s-created dashboards that are accessible during pre-visit planning sessions 10 to 14 days prior to the patient’s appointment. Physicians also use decision support tools and reminders within Quippe to enhance care and enrich the quality of documentation.
Michael Shishov, MD, one of Phoenix Children’s three pediatric rheumatologists, collaborated with Vaidya to spearhead these efforts. “Juvenile idiopathic arthritis is a complicated disease to document because we must capture details on 71 individual joints as well as a number of other measures. However, in collaboration with IT, we have developed an elegant template that enables efficient documentation of the joint exam as well as key quality metrics, including clinical inactive disease in juvenile idiopathic arthritis.”
He added, “Thanks to our IT specialists, clinical inactive disease, a complicated quality metric comprised of six different domains, is now successfully recorded by the providers in 99 percent of our notes—and we’re still able to complete almost all of our documentation during regular office hours.”
