Today I want to talk about another of the items we will discuss at this year's conferences. It has to do with meaningful use. We will spend a few minutes in our conference this year discussing meaningful use and how to quickly and easily implement it in your practice. But for those of you that already know me, you know I'm not going to leave it at that.
What I do is implement items in meaningful use so that I can improve my practice, improve my bottom line, and also track and report accountability. Let me give you an example.
One item for meaningful use is offering flu vaccines for patients over 50. I'm a pediatrician so using SerenityEMR I've turned on the setting to flag everyone over 6 months of age. If they've not had a flu vaccine this year and they haven't declined it and they don't have an allergy, then the system flags it. When the nurses check in a patient, Serenity directs them to ask the patient if they want a vaccine. The nurse has a choice of giving it, declining it, or 'ignoring' the question for today (sometimes you don't want to do it today for whatever reason).
Here's what I learned: I feel that I've always done a good job of tracking and getting the vaccines performed on the majority of my patients. But when I track the time period of September-December and compare 2011 to 2012, I found out that this year I gave 1292 flu vaccines verses 1108 last year. I know when you look at those numbers you think it is not that big of an improvement. But I want to remind you that I was already implementing significant strategies to make sure we were giving the vaccines. We had a good system already in place.
Here's another nice thing about our system. I pulled a report of all the nurses that responded to the meaningful use prompts. Guess what I found out? One nurse tended to 'ignore' this prompt four times as often as all the other nurses. Not only have we improved our practice by better patient care and more money, but I can improve our practice by tracking specific staff issues. I can give the details to the nurse and simply tell her that I will be tracking her numbers every month from here on out to make sure we see an improvement.
This new system using Serenity improved our flu vaccine rate by 16.6% and improved our bottom line profit by over $3500. All this from doing the type of good medicine that we are supposed to be doing anyway. Another way to look at it: SerenityEMR runs $550/month for a standard contract with e-prescribing. This one little part of meaningful use that we implemented literally paid for 6 months of Serenity in my office.