With the radical changes in the use of Electronic Medical Records (EMR) systems currently taking place across the nation, there's been a lot of talk about how Riverton Family Health Center prepared for this exhausting part of healthcare reform. Aaron Monson, practice administrator, and Heidi Monson, Medical Assisting manager, agree this process was a lot of work that required a lot of patience and commitment from their physicians and the support staff.

"We've made significant strides in reducing data entry latency and turnaround of medical results here at Riverton," says Aaron Monson. "We began in May of 2010 to assess our position relative to the Meaningful Use requirements, and in July 2010 we started training (or re-training) our staff to use our EMR system in a way that we could capture the data required for the reporting. More than a year later, with the assistance of HealthInsight, we have successfully completed our first attestation."

Monson continues, "The most difficult part of the whole process was changing the EMR usage habits of our employees. We have a great set of physicians and staff which care well for our patients, so the quality of our care was never in question. However, our EMR allows for a high degree of personalization that led to data capture problems that came to light when measured against the meaningful use reporting requirements. Having purchased our EMR four years ago, we had a significant amount of customization that had to be undone. Ultimately we had to retrain our physicians and staff to use the EMR in the specific, standardized manner prescribed by the vendor that would allow us to capture the necessary data for attestation."

Today, the Riverton Family Health Center's emphasis on quality is as high as ever. Monson says the center has always focused on quality management, performance improvement, and patient satisfaction. In recent months, Riverton set out to take that emphasis up a notch by joining HealthInsight's Beacon Project for improving diabetic care. They just completed their first Beacon milestone by increasing their A1C testing by 10% and were recognized as a pioneer at the recent Beacon conference.

Key to the future

As we continue along this path, we realize that patients are becoming more knowledgeable about the healthcare industry. Many have high expectations that the healthcare system should be as easy to access online as it is to read an e-mail. As part of stage one of Meaningful Use attestation, Riverton Family Health Center successfully conducted an electronic data exchange with other medical facilities as part of the implementation process. This means that more patients will be able to access their medical records online and physicians will be updated faster to provide better medical care across the board.

Riverton is looking forward to beginning stage two of Meaningful Use in the next few months. Congratulations to Riverton Family Health Center for achieving this certification of high medical standards!