5 Ways to Improve Your NextGen EHR Charting

The quality of your EHR charting has widespread impacts on your ambulatory practice's patient outcomes, continuity of care, physician engagement, and patient satisfaction. Several barriers stand in the way of improving your NextGen EHR charting, such as inefficient workflows, lack of mobility, and frustrating EHR interfaces. Use these five methods to make measurable improvements for your charts.

Use Standardized NextGen KBM Templates with Essential Customizations

If your physicians are all capturing information in non-standard NextGen KBM/ACE templates, you may miss out on utilizing and reporting on vital chart data. Standardizing the workflows and NextGen KBM templates you use is the first step to improving your practice's charts. Everyone has the same fields to fill out, so you'll have everything you need to treat patients, submit claims, and measure quality performance successfully.

These standardized NextGen KBM templates should be only be customized based on your practice's needs, rather for individual physician preferences. You want to present a uniform and consistent workflow to as many of your physicians as possible. You don't want to have physicians trying to work around system limitations by taking down information outside of the NextGen EHR or using another inefficient system to do so. With well customized NextGen EHR templates, you can virtually eliminate unnecessary clicking, saving physicians and nurses valuable time.

Get feedback from your doctors and nurses as you write requirements, develop, and implement these templates. They can let you know if any clinical information is missing and if the workflow is sufficient. If you expand your clinical services or specialties in the future, you can take advantage of the clinical content-rich NextGen KBM templates while improving physician satisfaction.

Using standardized templates that are lightly customized also reduces the time you spend onboarding new staff. They don't have to learn multiple charting options for different physicians and specialties. You have a single method for operating to minimize confusion, errors, and decreased productivity.

Optimize Workflows for Your Ambulatory Practice's Specialty

Your NextGen EHR workflows should also accommodate your specialty, much like the templates do. Adapt these processes to the way that your physicians work, rather than the other way around. Automating time-consuming parts of the charting process is a particularly valuable part of workflow optimization, and one TempDev NextGen EHR template developers are adept at doing. For example, use template development to customize your NextGen EHR system to process custom content information automatically, scrub the data for errors, which means more time for your busy staff to focus on patient care.

The inefficiencies that you should look out for with workflows varies based on your specialty, but here are a few suggestions:

• Repeated data entry

• Data siloed in multiple systems that should be interfaced

• Physicians resorting to writing down information instead of using a clunky workflow

• Too many clicks to get to frequently used parts of NextGen EHR

• Frequently missed parts of the patient's chart

• Difficulties with entering documentation

Implement NextGen Mobile Charting Solutions

Limited access to workstations for NextGen EHR charting may result in incomplete, rushed, or inaccurate documentation. Whether your physicians are working from home through telehealth appointments or in the office, inconsistent use of technology is a challenge.

NextGen EHR supports device-agnostic ways of charting with NextGen Mobile to assist with alleviating this issue. If your doctors are without their laptops when new patient information comes in, they don't have to panic over the resulting documentation loss. Instead, you have easy access to devices capable of supporting your physicians with these tasks.

Another advantage of improved mobility is that your physicians can work on familiar devices with simplified workflows. 

Integrate NextGen EHR with Patient Data Sources

Every time someone needs to enter data manually, you introduce the potential for human error. Data entry also takes time away from direct patient care and can increase waiting times, and these issues impact both outcomes and patient satisfaction.

Repeating work may lead to frustration for your staff as well. When they have busy schedules, tracking down data for disparate sources, or performing redundant work can lead to burnout and a lack of engagement. Physician burnout is a significant problem in the healthcare industry, so introducing technology to make their life easier is essential to keeping your workforce happy. Automate and centralize as much patient data as possible by integrating your systems with NextGen EHR. This single source of truth has many benefits for your ambulatory practice, especially when it comes to reducing error rates and making it easy to consolidate patient information.

Offer a User-friendly NextGen EHR Charting Experience

How complicated is the NextGen EHR charting process for your staff? Some systems are challenging to learn and use for some users, especially without proper training. Some may find it to have non-intuitive navigation, with content hidden in template pop-ups throughout the platform. The clinical content that is needed may be difficult to find, or field picklists do not offer the right options.

NextGen EHR performance can be another source of frustration. If it takes too long to move between sections on the chart or to save information, then physicians may use other documentation tools or write down the data on paper. You can alleviate these issues often through configuration, system analysis, database tuning, and the implementation of features such as NextGen BBP, Report Server.

The user-friendliness is also based on NextGen EHR training and training materials available and how much time your physicians have to access those resources. Your staff can't maximize the value of charting features if they don't know how to use the software properly, and they might not know of the time-saving measures that exist. A NextGen EHR workflow assessment with your staff to see whether a lack of information is the main barrier may be crucial to improving user experience.

Well documented medical charts are worth their weight in gold for ambulatory practices. These five methods set your practice up for success and empower your physicians with the support they need to offer quality patient care during these trying times.

Contact TempDev NextGen EHR consultants and leverage our years of experience in NextGen EHR & EPM and other healthcare solutions. We'll help you transform your NextGen EHR charting and support your practice throughout the process. Call us at 888.TEMP.DEV, or click here to start!