Most Health Workers Use Social Media for Professional Purposes

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About 75% of workers at U.S. health care provider organizations use social media tools for professional purposes, according to a survey by Frost & Sullivan and the Institute for Health Technology Transformation, Healthcare IT News reports.

About the Survey

For the survey, which was conducted between April and May 2011, researchers interviewed 63 individuals working at different health care provider institutions. Of the survey respondents:

• 42 worked at private or public hospitals;
• 11 worked at various patient care settings; and
• 10 worked at physician offices.

In addition:

• 33% of respondents were IT professionals;
• 13% were administrators;
• 7% were physicians; and
• 6% were other health care professionals.

Survey Findings

Of the respondents who reported using social media for professional purposes:

• 74% said social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter are the most popular types of social media used for professional reasons; and
• One-third said they are required to use social media as part of their professional duties.

According to the survey, the most popular reasons for using social media tools were related to brand awareness, business development and marketing.

The survey also found that:

• A majority of health care provider institutions have an electronic communications policy in place;
• 60% of organizations say their social media use met or exceeded institutional expectations;
• 38% of institutions use dedicated staff for their social media campaigns;
• 33% of institutions do not allow employees to access social media, mostly because of security issues and concerns about productivity; and
• 19% of institutions use external parties to manage social media communications (Merrill, Healthcare IT News, 9/8).

Source: iHealthBeat

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Technology nod: Healthcare strives for ‘paperless office’

They take up space, put a crimp in the work process and they don’t generate revenue — and at the Bone & Joint Clinic in Franklin, file cabinets are a thing of the past.

The clinic has gone paperless, moving everything from patient insurance card information to records and charts into digital information stored on servers.

“As of now, we’re completely paperless. We scan everything and then throw it away,” says Duane Murray, Bone & Joint CEO.

Under the new setup, doctors dictate the specifics of their visits with patients and then transcriptionists type up the notes and put them into the patient’s digital file.

Insurance cards that were once copied and re-copied for each new patient are scanned into the clinic’s database and placed in the patient’s electronic file. The clinic put flat-screen monitors in each examination room.

It’s a solution to a problem that is inherent in any medical practice of an appreciable size.

Keeping and tracking patient records is a cumbersome process filled with plenty of wasted time, he says.

“Most practices have been struggling with the same problem. The question of `where’s the chart?'” Murray says. “Based on any individual patient’s scenario, his or her chart could be in 20 different places at any time. Multiply that by a few hundred patients.”

The bottom line is finding a cost-effective solution to the problems of the daily grind in a medical facility, Murray says.

“You don’t want to be equipment-based as much as solution-based,” he says. “In our case it was space and inaccessibility of records. You have to have those motivations there.”

Financial rewards

All contracts signed by the company are handled digitally and Bone & Joint is moving its human resources functions into the system — maintaining an employee director, orientation manuals and handbooks in digital form made accessible to employees.

“I now have the capacity to grow efficiently. I didn’t look at this as means to reduce staff,” he says.

Faced with an expanding business, the clinic needed to increase the size of its facilities. The problem: how best to handle the expense of a buildout while growing efficiently. The answer was to turn existing space tied to filing and paper-laden back office functions into patient space.

The clinic spent $70,000 in upgrades to the building’s systems and network and another $80,000 doing chart conversions.

“This approach is more cost-effective for us. We would’ve spent $70,000 on upgrades anyway and then we would still have the question of `Do I build another building?'” Murray says. “I know $80,000 wouldn’t build an additional building.”

Moving into a paperless environment gives the clinic a leg-up on meeting federal Health Insurance Privacy and Portability Act (HIPPA) requirements.

Part of the federal legislation requires health care facilities to guard patient records closely and increase availability to the records.

A byproduct of the technology upgrade should also cut costs on the development of the Bone & Joint’s new surgery center. Construction on the $3.8 million surgery center is expected to begin this summer on a vacant lot adjacent to the clinic, will be linked into the clinic’s files and network.

Rather than go full-bore into new technology, the clinic started small, Murray says.

After visiting a paperless clinic in Lexington, Ky., Family Practice Associates, Bone & Joint officials began the planning process of making a similar move in baby-step fashion, focusing only on the processing of insurance cards, then expanding gradually to include all records.

Digital Vandy

Vanderbilt Medical Center’s division of general internal medicine has also taken up the paperless methods to keeping track of patient records with software systems developed in-house.

The StarChart and StarPanel programs are home runs in managing records associated with the 700,000 outpatient visits at the Medical Center and its clinics, says Nancy Lorenzi, professor and vice-chancellor in medical center’s office of informatics

“If you visit to our clinics twice a year, that counts as two visits. We count each time a patient comes in,” she says. “StarChart is our electronic repository of data (related to those visits).”

Going to digital records allows the Vanderbilt clinics to pull out the bulk of its paper records and speed the efficiency of access, she says.

“(An) adult primary care physician is able to take all of the StarChart ocean (of information) and pull information about only his patients. What he now has is the ability to look at just those records, so if he orders a

test, the new results come onto the screen,” she explains.

“If a major drug has a recall, he could sort out the five or 10 patients on that particular drug in less than a minute. The way it was, when a major drug is withdrawn, we would have nurses, secretaries and others going through charts.”

The design of the system was based on a survey of physicians on how they would like to practice medicine in 2004.

“We wanted to take them out far enough to say, `If you had your vision, what would you do?'” she says. “In Informatics, we have been trying to create the products to make that a reality.”

The result was the E3 project (electronic in three years) and StarChart and StarPanel are steps in that direction.

White patient care has been at the forefront of technological advancement, medical facilities have lagged behind the corporate world in the adoption of record keeping and back-office systems, says Abe Niedzwiecki, president of CabinetNG.

Located in Athens, Ala., near Huntsville, CabinetNG developed the systems used by the Bone & Joint Clinic.

It’s not so much the lack of desire to move toward paperless technology that has held up the medical industry. It was the cost and the cost is dropping, Niedzweicki says.

“This software has been around since 1992,” he says. “The other side (facility network infrastructure) didn’t catch up to make it viable cost-wise. The hardware, the PCs, the storage space and those kind of things have come down in cost.”

HIPPA is also a driving force in the increase of demand.

Source: NBJ

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Experts Discuss Issues on Use of EHR Data in Malpractice Situations

Experts say electronic health record data present new challenges for health care organizations because such information can be used as legal representation of patients’ health conditions and treatment, InformationWeek reports.

Health IT stakeholders discussed concerns associated with the use of EHR data in legal settings this week at an American Health Information Management Association summit in Chicago.

EHRs in Court

Stacey Cischke — an attorney who teaches at Loyola University Chicago — said that an increasing number of courts are saying that metadata and “access to the inner workings of the EHR system” can be relevant and discoverable in judicial proceedings.

Adam Greene — a partner in the law firm of Davis Wright Tremaine — said there are “all sorts of liability fears” that come with EHR use, including the concern that EHR access logs could be used in malpractice suits. HIPAA rules require those who handle EHR data to log access to information that is personally identifiable.

Cischke added that physicians and nurses sometimes can be “overwhelmed” by time or economic constraints, which could lead to incomplete information in an EHR. However, unlike paper-based records, EHRs generally do not allow alterations after a physician signs off on the record of a patient visit.

Cischke recommended that health care providers work to identify potential lawsuits and promote consistency in how they produce reports and react to legal action. She said internal and external counsel and staff should learn about how EHR systems work (Versel, InformationWeek, 8/17).

Source: iHealthBeat

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The Business of Physician Recruitment

In the face of a possible double-dip recession and the implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act set to bring on increasing numbers of insured Americans, the recruitment of new physicians is becoming more and more vital to the success of small practices. But how can small practices attract new talent without exceeding their budgets?

As  baby boomers age and choose to retire from the workforce and health care reform law both changes compensation trends and bolsters previously uninsured Americans into insurance eligibility, the demand for medical services will continue to increase as the pool of physicians struggles to keep up. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services projections, as put forth in the 2006 report “Physician Supply and Demand: Projections to 2020,” estimate that as the population grows and ages, physician demand will stabilize. Small practices, however, must be proactive in hiring and retaining talented, adept physicians to stay competitive.

According to the “2009 Physician Retention Survey,” conducted by the American Medical Group Association and Cejka Search, most employment-seeking physicians are drawn to monetary incentives, chief among them being market-based compensation, signing bonuses and income guarantees. If a practice has little financial latitude, it can quickly become difficult to prioritize money spent on recruiting versus everyday operational expenses. Therefore, in addition to practicing selective spending on recruitment, practices should implement the following, nonfinancial practices to increase the caliber of physician searches.

Customize Your Approach

Medical groups surveyed in the 2009 Physician Retention Survey indicated that physicians in different stages of their careers value different, nonmonetary incentives from employers. For physicians early in their careers, advanced technology was an important characteristic of future employers. Diverting limited monies toward the acquisition of new technology not only is attractive to potential new hires, but it also shows patients that the practice is committed to providing the highest level of care.

Physicians nearing the middle of their careers value leadership or shareholder opportunities, while late-career physicians trend toward medical practices that offer flexible hours.

Network

Whether through social media sites or at local medical association functions, networking is one of the age-old practices utilized by successful businesses. By associating yourself with other medical professionals in the community (and beyond), physicians position themselves in the chain of knowledge. If an outside physician decides to cut back on his or her hours to spend more time with family, for example, a small, well-connected practice can step in to meet the need.

Brand Your Practice

Just as branding is important to any small business, it should also be important for medical practices. A 2011 Journal of the Association of Staff Physician Recruiters article recommends that physicians reflect on the aspects of their medical practice that makes it unique and tailor that into a succinct message that meets the professional needs of potential new hires. Does your practice have a rare, new, state-of-the-art piece of instrumentation or high visibility within the local community? Characteristics such as these are assets to a practice and could potentially sway a physician candidate toward accepting your offer over another.

Loan Repayment

Although not a direct offering from practice to physician, medical practices located in rural or urban areas can entice potential physicians with the incentive of the National Health Service Corps Loan Repayment program. With payouts ranging from $60,000 (for two years of service) to total loan payment (for six or more years of service), the program places primary care physicians in underserved communities called Health Professional Shortage Areas (HPSA). Visit www.nhsc.hrsa.gov/loanrepayment/ to see if your practice qualifies as an HPSA.

MD News August 2011