The Future Is Mobile

Who doesn’t want to make delivering and documenting care easier? Increasingly, accessing information and performing tasks in the EHR on a mobile device, from anywhere anytime, provides more quality time for patients and less agonizing time after hours sifting through “paperwork,” electronic or otherwise. Let’s break it down:

5 good reasons to go mobile

1. Reduce provider burnout

Medical practices across the United States are being ravaged by provider burnout. A significant contributor to this phenomenon is excessive documentation demands. Mobile devices reduce time spent in front of the EHR. Implementing mobile greatly reduces the need for after-hours charting and can eliminate it altogether—which translates into a lower risk of burnout for physicians.

2. Increase flexibility and freedom

Imagine you are at home or at a sporting event and an urgent patient call comes through. With a mobile device, you can access the patient record from your smartphone without a complex VPN login process. In many cases, you’ll be able to address the patient’s needs from your smartphone without having to return to the office or log into a desktop or laptop computer.

3. Max out efficiency

Mobile technology is being used more and more in the administration of medical practice. Providers and staff are discovering ways to use mobile to meet the day-to-day demands of their work more easily. Here’s one example: Front desk staff use a scanning feature to scan documents into a patient chart because it's faster and easier than using the full-sized scanner that sits in the back office.

4. Finish faster—and with greater accuracy

Mobile capability opens the door to many options for better, faster, easier documentation. It facilitates documenting the patient encounter by dictation rather than typing on a keyboard. Using dictation software is faster than typing. Furthermore, dictation software today is more accurate than ever.

5. The future is mobile

Mobile devices are getting better, faster, and more powerful. NextGen Healthcare continues to add functionality and clinical workflows to its mobile offering. You may be pleasantly surprised by how many administrative tasks you can tackle with your smartphone and how much faster and easier it is than desktop. It won’t be long before providers will have the option to use mobile as their main documentation solution.

Details, details

So what exactly are the benefits of mobile? Let’s focus on just two of the “biggies”: patient details and scribe services. For the former, NextGen® Mobile provides access to virtually all information from the patient chart. It includes previous encounters and the full documents and images list—viewable by category as in the EHR. Within this module you can perform many functions in the patient chart. Using your mobile device you can:

• Create an encounter for the patient
• Review the patient chart and any documents & images
• Dictate notes regarding the patient into the chart
• See any alerts related to the patient
• Take photos and scan images and upload them to the chart
• Add a diagnosis to the patient’s record, which in turn enables you to add charge codes
• Prescribe medications, including controlled substances

With NextGen® Remote Scribe Services, providers can break free from the EHR to the greatest extent possible. Here’s how:

• The physician dictates the encounter into their mobile device using the NextGen Mobile app.
• The recording is then passed along to the remote scribe.
• Using a fully HIPAA-compliant process, a professional scribe in a remote location listens to the recording and documents the patient encounter as instructed by the physician.
• The scribe enters discrete data and unstructured text notes directly into the EHR via remote access.

NextGen® Remote Scribe Services means providers can meet all their documentation requirements in much less time. It also improves documentation accuracy. For practice administrators, NextGen Remote Scribe Services eliminates pressure to find qualified staff to serve as scribes and train them. Or up the ante with NextGen® Virtual Live Scribe, which eases workloads, increases productivity, and reduces the documentation burden to almost zero.

Life is short. Don’t spend more time than necessary in front of the EHR. For more information, visit our website and check out our latest e-book.