BURLINGTON, MA – Several healthcare providers are finding it necessary to separate their point-of-care electronic health records from their legal EHRs, and that suits Carl Cottrell just fine.
But the senior director of product marketing for ChartOne, the Burlington, Mass.-based provider of medical records workflow products, says too many providers think they need only one EHR – to the detriment of their revenue cycle management processes.
“They really have totally different purposes,” says Cottrell. “And when you try to sneak revenue-cycle stuff into point-of-care stuff, it generally makes things worse.”
According to Cottrell, a legal EHR is “designed to be memorialized,” meaning it should have a shelf life of 10 to 25 years. As a historical document, it charts the medical care process from beginning to end, including the history of care and the chain of clinical decisions. That data is then used for legal purposes as well as for revenue cycle management.
On the other hand, Cottrell says, a point-of-care EHR “is designed to give you the correct patient record right at that second” and is used solely for clinical decisions. It’s intended to follow the patient through a hospital stay, then be discarded in favor of a legal EHR.
ChartOne’s operations are divided into two divisions – Release of Information (ROI) Services, which covers the legal EHR field, and eWebHealth, which develops the point-of-care EHR.
“IT guys nowadays have an idea of ‘one document, one version, one place,’ which isn’t good,” says Cottrell. “First, they would have to have the concept of completeness, which no EHR does.”
In addition, he says, “the vast majority of (healthcare providers) still use paper – their legal record is paper.”
The distinction isn’t lost on St. Vincent’s Hospital Manhattan, part of the Saint Vincent Catholic Medical Centers system. Earlier this year, the 529-bed teaching hospital, based in New York’s Greenwich Village, implemented ChartOne ROI Services to streamline its health information management workflow and improve the delivery of electronic medical records to the business office – thereby creating a legal EHR.
“The support we are receiving from ChartOne is exceptional, and allows us to sustain a regulatory compliant, efficient and streamlined ROI department,” said Maria Muscarella, vice president of health information management and electronic medical record program director at St. Vincent’s.
Others signing on with ChartOne this year include Ardent Health Services, which implemented ChartOne’s technology at Hillcrest Medical Center, Oklahoma State University Medical Center and Hillcrest Specialty Hospital, all based in Tulsa, Okla.; and the St. Francis Health Center in Topeka, Kan., which implemented ChartOne’s eWebHealth EHR technology.
“Automating our medical records processes was essential to improve physician satisfaction and patient safety,” said Judy Hintzman, St. Francis’ HIM director. “Our investment in eWebHealth’s technology has allowed us to further engage our physicians with innovative technology that will facilitate decision-making and communications with their patients.”