By Haley Holmes
Jul 28, 2023
The digitization of health records offers numerous benefits, including improved personalized healthcare and cost reduction. However, the introduction of electronic health records (EHRs) presented several challenges, particularly for physicians. The time spent on EHRs and patient encounter documentation has increased, diverting physician’s time and attention from patient care and contributing to burnout. Decision-makers are now focused on quantifying and tracking the return on investment (ROI) from these initiatives to justify the investments. This requires a comprehensive understanding of the sources of ROI that come from digitization efforts.
Let us in this blog post evaluate the impact of six sources of ROI when considering solutions for the digitization of health records and patient encounter documentation.
1. Practice Efficiency Gains
Physicians value their time greatly, and EHRs and patient encounter documentation solutions can streamline processes and eliminate non-value-added activities. Research shows that physicians spend a significant amount of time on documentation, which negatively impacts their practice. Traditional methods, such as self-documentation or dictation solutions, have drawbacks, including lengthy response times and excessive data entry. AI-based digital scribes, however, offer accurate and efficient documentation, allowing physicians to spend more time with patients. These solutions require minimal training, cost less, and can lead to significant cost savings and increased earnings potential.
2. Minimal Disruption to Patient Experience
Patient experience is a vital aspect of healthcare quality, and it depends on meaningful information sharing and active engagement between patients and physicians. Self-documentation using EHRs can hinder the patient-clinician relationship due to long response times and excessive data entry. Traditional transcription methods are expensive and time-consuming, further disrupting the patient experience. In contrast, digital scribes provide real-time, accurate documentation without interfering with patient focus. They are able to process clinical encounters involving different languages and medical jargon variations, making them a patient-friendly solution.
3. AI-Driven Diagnosis & Treatment Recommendations
Digital archives and electronic health records provide vast amounts of data, and AI-based digital scribes utilize this data to assist physicians. These solutions offer decision support capabilities, sharing best practice experiences and knowledge from other doctors. They can also leverage machine learning models to predict populations at risk and provide personalized and contextualized plans of care. This advanced technology enhances diagnosis and treatment recommendations, benefiting both physicians and patients.
4. Medico-Legal Compliance
Accurate medical records are crucial for legal defense and malpractice claims. Capturing precise information in real time is paramount, particularly when dealing with unfamiliar medical terminology. HIPAA-certified AI-based digital scribes excel in surfacing exceptions for physicians to address, thanks to their support for interoperability between healthcare systems. This ensures accurate documentation and strengthens medico-legal compliance.
5. Low/No Switching Costs
Switching costs can be significant for businesses when changing solutions or providers. AI-based digital scribes, unlike traditional methods, offer cloud-based, subscription-based solutions with minimal learning curves. This reduces barriers to trying and switching, improving physician efficiency and patient care without incurring excessive costs.
6. Scalability
The scalability of patient encounter documentation solutions is essential for maximizing ROI. Digital solutions enable healthcare executives and managers to enhance efficiency and compliance advantages as their business grows, without costly infrastructure upgrades. This scalability ensures long-term benefits without sacrificing convenience.
When considering solutions for the digitization of health records and patient encounter documentation, it is crucial to evaluate the impact of these six sources of ROI. AI-based scribes provide comprehensive advantages in terms of practice efficiency gains, minimal disruption to patient experience, AI-driven diagnosis and treatment recommendations, medico-legal compliance, low/no switching costs, and scalability. By prioritizing these factors, healthcare providers can achieve improved outcomes for both physicians and patients, ensuring a successful transition to digital documentation.
If you are using AI scribing tools considering its speed and efficiency but not satisfied with the quality and accuracy of machine generated notes, Scribe4Me's human scribes can review and quality check it to ensure that your charts are accurate, complete and relevant. To learn more give us a call at (908)736-4180.
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Haley Holmes
Haley Holmes
Documentation is an important daily clinical responsibility. In order to optimize patient care, physicians are always on the lookout for new ways to effectively and efficiently document patient visits.
The use of virtual medical scribes has become increasingly popular in the recent years, as medical practices across the country are on the constant lookout for ways to reduce clinical documentation overload, thereby improving overall productivity.
The clerical burden associated with EHR usage is attributed as the number one cause of physician burnout. We also know that physicians spend twice as much time on EHRs and other clerical tasks compared to the time providing patient care.
