Transformations to Reduce EHR Usability Burden
Among the transformations that can help relieve EHR usability burden are three key innovations. Your investment of time and resources to adopt one of these new environments will ultimately pay significant dividends: reduced burden and more meaningful time with patients.
Team-based care
Redistribute your EHR challenges among your care team so you can focus on patients.
Direct primary care (DPC)
Escaping fee-for-service care also means eliminating the need for most documentation.
Value-based care (VBC)
Models allowing less patient visit volume are improving — begin planning now.
The team model relieves burden by delegating EHR tasks to other members of the care team. In this model’s simplest form, the physician tasks a medical assistant with documenting and clinically assisting during the visit.
The MA begins taking notes with the patient prior to the physician entering the room, then stays and acts as a scribe. The MA also operates here as a clinical assistant, preparing the patient for the visit as well as for after-visit care.
Family medicine practices typically partner each physician with one MA. The team-based care model puts more responsibilities on the MA per visit, and some practices use more MAs. While one MA is working in the room with the physician, a second can be rooming the next patient.
This team model has been shown to be more productive, outweighing the additional staffing costs.
The direct primary care model gives family physicians a meaningful alternative to fee-for-service insurance billing, typically by charging patients a monthly, quarterly, or annual fee. This fee covers all or most primary care services, including clinical and laboratory services, consultative services, care coordination, and comprehensive care management.
In direct primary care, physicians typically are paid under a monthly membership model. This eliminates most of the administrative tasks inherent to the fee-for-service reimbursement demands of the value-based payment model, taking with it the need for much of the EHR documentation, coding and revenue-cycle functions.
DPC benefits patients by providing substantial savings and a greater degree of access to, and time with, physicians.
DPC allows family physicians to care for the whole person while reducing the overhead and negative incentives associated with fee-for-service third-party-payer billing. Benefits of DPC to physicians include:
- More time with patients
- Simplified revenue structure
- Decreased practice overhead
- Reduced adminstrative burden
- High practice satisfaction and low burnout
AAFP: Direct Primary Care Reduces Documentation Burden
Moving from fee-for-service to direct primary care eliminates documentation and most other administrative burdens.
Value-based care promises to reduce administrative burdens associated with the fee-for-service model. Shifting to payment centered on “value” is meant to decrease the volume of visits and the associated administrative complexity inherent to using EHR.
Unfortunately, too many of the value-based payment models so far available to primary care suffer from inadequate FFS payment and poorly designed measurement, which together increase burden on physician practices.
The value-based models that are working point to what’s possible: population-based prospective payment for high-quality care that allows physicians to achieve the quintuple aim while seeing significant reductions in burden.
AAFP: 9 Reasons You Should Try Value-based Payment
Successful family physicians give the top nine reasons why you should implement value-based payment in your practice and make primary care the cornerstone of all care.
