Electronic Intake Data Capture in Pain Clinic

[drg123]

We still have patinets fill out paper charts, which is time consuming and not useful since it has to get scanned into the EMR, so not searchable. The patient is giving you the HPI basically in writing. This should be going automatically into your note, IMO, without manual input.

Is anyone here doing all electronic data capture on intake and follow up? Are you doing PROs (outcome measures) to see the efficacy of your treatments?

One of the departments here hands every patient an ipad in the waiting room.

I'm wondering whether I could make it a pre-condition of seeing me in clinic to fill this out. It would make my time with the patient in clinic more valuable since I wouldn't have to go through the scripted "so on a scale from 0-10, rate your pain" kind of stuff.

Thoughts?

---

Members don't see this ad.

 

[callmeanesthesia]

More importantly, what application/vendor are you using to collect this information, and how much does it cost?

We’ve looked at Phreesia, which will collect the electronic intake info, also electronic check in and appointment reminders. I don’t think it flows into the HPI though, at least not with our EMR. The main problem we have is that it will collect benefits info and verify eligibility, but if there’s a keystroke error it won’t kick it back to the patient to redo - the front desk will have to verify and re-enter the info.

One guy in the group built a Google Forms survey (Business platform so it’s HIPAA-compliant) and would then copy and paste the output into his note. However then the data is all text rather than discrete elements so it’s harder to use for meaningless use criteria.

Patient Tracking Software | Patient Tracking System | PatientTrak

PatientTrak's tracking solution provides complete visibility through the entire healthcare visit. Improve workflow and know exactly where your patients are.

www.patienttrak.net

I’ve looked at this one but haven’t contacted them yet. Their pricing seems great for what they offer. Also not sure of the degree of interoperability with EMR.

 

[gdub25]

Yes, we do this with eClinical Works and it works nicely. They get an iPad and essentially the HPI is done for us as well as past medical history, family history, social history etc. Medications we have to put in ourselves.

In theory this sounds like a dream I know, but still it only works out about half the time. Most pain patients are older and many simply refuse to work with the iPad and say they can’t figure it out.

 

[PainMD23]

We also ask patients to fill out new patient forms / patient packet before their visit, which I have found to be extremely inefficient. We have clinical assistants who then take the paper packet and input the data into the EHR, after scanning the paper forms into the chart. The redundancy of this process has always annoyed me, and I agree there should be a solution that actually works, where the HPI, past medical history, social history, surgical history etc. gets updated automatically from the patient's direct input.

I have been looking for this Holy Grail for quite some time. We currently use Athena, and I explored Phreesia and some other vendors for this process. We noticed that some orthopedics practices and larger university practices had employed this, seemingly with some success. After a lot of vetting and trialing Phreesia, we signed a contract with them for 12 months. During implementation, I spent 100+ hours writing templates for new patient visits, follow-up visits and procedure visits where the information patients provided would flow directly into the Athena note. Unfortunately, after 12 months, it was a failure. We ended up spending much more on HR costs, and our patient through-put went down. Unfortunately pain patients are fairly old, set in their ways, and their family / friends often won't help them use technology. Despite sending emails, texts prior to visits with links to fill out Phreesia prior to the visit, and giving patients iPads at the visit, there was a less than 50% adoption rate for Phreesia. Our staff had to help patients input the data which slowed everything down. We ended up pulling the plug and going back to paper with Clinical Assistants pulling up the slack.

I'm hopeful for some AI healthcare companies to take up the slack and provide a good solution. I've been exploring a few options for AI assisted intake but it doesn't look great yet. Every time I get excited about some digital documentation / EHR advance that actually improves the Physician experience or patient experience I am disappointed. As we all know, EHR solutions in healthcare have been an absolute failure and are a primary contributor to physician burnout.

Our office is currently vetting new EHR's. Although we like Athena, it is very costly. We are looking at eclinical works, ModMed, advancedMD and a few others.

If any of you have a positive experience to share regarding electronic patient data input, AI or other, which flows into the EHR, I am all ears.

 

[Multimodal]

we use eclinical works with a third party company called DrPlan. they send out emails and texts so patients have to check in to their visits through the system. we just rolled it out 3 weeks ago but it does an amazing job at filling the HPI with relevant info. we do still have to update medications like others mentioned above. I also like how it can send preprocedure videos to patients and it documents that they watched it

 

[Painologist]

we use eclinical works with a third party company called DrPlan. they send out emails and texts so patients have to check in to their visits through the system. we just rolled it out 3 weeks ago but it does an amazing job at filling the HPI with relevant info. we do still have to update medications like others mentioned above. I also like how it can send preprocedure videos to patients and it documents that they watched it

What kind of pre-procedure videos do you have patients watch? Also, does Dr Plan sync with eCW nicely?

 

[drg123]

We also ask patients to fill out new patient forms / patient packet before their visit, which I have found to be extremely inefficient. We have clinical assistants who then take the paper packet and input the data into the EHR, after scanning the paper forms into the chart. The redundancy of this process has always annoyed me, and I agree there should be a solution that actually works, where the HPI, past medical history, social history, surgical history etc. gets updated automatically from the patient's direct input.

I have been looking for this Holy Grail for quite some time. We currently use Athena, and I explored Phreesia and some other vendors for this process. We noticed that some orthopedics practices and larger university practices had employed this, seemingly with some success. After a lot of vetting and trialing Phreesia, we signed a contract with them for 12 months. During implementation, I spent 100+ hours writing templates for new patient visits, follow-up visits and procedure visits where the information patients provided would flow directly into the Athena note. Unfortunately, after 12 months, it was a failure. We ended up spending much more on HR costs, and our patient through-put went down. Unfortunately pain patients are fairly old, set in their ways, and their family / friends often won't help them use technology. Despite sending emails, texts prior to visits with links to fill out Phreesia prior to the visit, and giving patients iPads at the visit, there was a less than 50% adoption rate for Phreesia. Our staff had to help patients input the data which slowed everything down. We ended up pulling the plug and going back to paper with Clinical Assistants pulling up the slack.

I'm hopeful for some AI healthcare companies to take up the slack and provide a good solution. I've been exploring a few options for AI assisted intake but it doesn't look great yet. Every time I get excited about some digital documentation / EHR advance that actually improves the Physician experience or patient experience I am disappointed. As we all know, EHR solutions in healthcare have been an absolute failure and are a primary contributor to physician burnout.

Our office is currently vetting new EHR's. Although we like Athena, it is very costly. We are looking at eclinical works, ModMed, advancedMD and a few others.

If any of you have a positive experience to share regarding electronic patient data input, AI or other, which flows into the EHR, I am all ears.

This is a really excellent answer. Thanks for sharing. It sounds like we have the same vision and you've actually tried to enact it, with thus far, sub-par results. I hope we will one day have the solution we need. Our time as physicians isn't well spent by asking the rote scripted stuff and we can't use valuable clinic time to do the kind of comprehensive data gathering we need. If we can get patients to do that on their own time, our clinical encounters can be much more fruitful I think. Heck, I'd build in time before my day to review the inputs from each patient and actually spend more than 30 sec thinking of their diagnoses because I'll have all the data points beforehand.

As far as tools, this looks interesting.

Patient Intake and Preparation

Orbita Patient Intake and Preparation automates routine workflows, digitizing paper-based intake forms and disjointed portal questionnaires to gather critical data.

orbita.ai

I'm going to find out more. Apparently their system will do email, web or phone. The phone could be useful for seniors who maybe don't feel comfortable doing web or text interfaces, but will give answers via phone.