Changing the physician's signature line to include specialty

The group saw value in this addition, but saw challenges in

• Tracking residents' specialty from month-to-month.
• Prioritizing this request against another physician request: including troponin in the daily labs SmartTemplate.

The majority of the group wanted troponin before physician signature.

[] Anupam to investigate where these requests might be slotted in the work queue. If the signature and SmartTemplate work are performed by separate teams, then we will proceed down both paths simultaneously. Otherwise, we will work on the SmartTemplate request first.

Transcription reduction

Lutheran General has seen the greatest decrease in transcription costs since January. Doug described his site's efforts including regular meetings with informatics and HIM to discuss tactics to reduce transcription costs. Some specific efforts include:

• Not allowing housestaff to use transcription numbers.
• Focus on outlier physicians
• A physician leader spoke about the value of PC Touch to his colleagues at a staff meeting

At Lutheran General, challenges to transcription reduction include

• Working with Dragon
• Having enough microphones on the floors

Several members pointed out challenges with PC Touch:

• When using an older phone or iPad in a noisy environment, the devices seem to pick up ambient noise including device alerts that slow down the system.
• It is very difficult to edit notes in PC Touch. Sakhie saves the note to then edit on a desktop later. Others pointed out the reduced convenience with that workflow, but there should be fewer errors if used on both mobile and desktop platforms.
• Nurse-entered diagnoses automatically show up in the notes. Ideally, physicians would have the option of adding and removing the list of diagnoses by voice command.
• Diagnoses are added to the end of a PowerNote, but diagnoses need to be considered before the start of a PC Touch note. This is a significant change in workflow.
• No H&P template in PC Touch.

At many sites, the users who were comfortable with Dragon are the ones who are migrating to PC Touch. The harder push will be to move those physicians on transcription over to PC Touch.

[] Anupam to update the website with tips & tricks on how to better use the documentation functionality within PC Touch
[] Anupam to ask Cerner for the estimated dates when H&P, operative notes and discharge summaries will be available in PC Touch (again)
[] Anupam to investigate options to pull in patient diagnoses on demand.

Timesheets

Anupam asked the group to turn in the timesheets by the 3rd of the month to guarantee payment.

[] Anupam to distribute a timesheet template including a fax number to be used by those individuals who do not use a template currently.

System slowness

Several users at multiple sites have noticed CareConnection running slower than usual.

[] Anupam to ask the CareConnection team to produce some metrics on performance before and after the most recent upgrade.

The next meeting is scheduled for Juneat 0730 hours.

Minutes from other meetings