Preparing your Office suite for changes brought by COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced businesses to be creative with collaboration and productivity — and made work from home (WFH) setups through Microsoft applications more prominent. Just make sure your data is safe in your employees’ hands by following these tips. Before the pandemic broke out, companies across the United States had already been on […]

Pandemic pushes millions to the cloud

COVID-19 is now a global pandemic. Millions of people are affected as countries go on lockdown to halt the spread of the disease. Many employees are forced to work from home. That’s why there’s a sudden surge in demand for cloud-based services worldwide. Can the web infrastructure survive this pandemic, too? Even before the pandemic, […]

What’s all the fuss about EMR (Electronic Medical Records)?

A hidden cost of medical care is in the lack of communication between care providers.  This can result in duplication of tests and unnecessary fragmentation of the patients care.  EMRs solve these and more issues confronting health care today. In some cases the patient received treatment or even hospitalization without the knowledge or involvement of the primary care provider or the support team.  Even patients who are referred to a specialist by the primary care provider often return to the primary’s office without results or documentation of the outcome of the visit to a specialist. Communication is, of course, a two-way street and patients need to take the initiative to ask for their records when seeing a specialist.  Never assume that this is happening.  In addition, patients should review their own records annually to be certain everything there is up to date, inclusive, and accurate. The Government is emphasizing EMR systems as a means to end these problems and create communication between care providers at the speed of light.  While it will take time for EMRs to be pervasive, the first milestone is upon us.  Medical practices can qualify for up to $44,000 per physician in government funding to adopt EMRs.  The condition is that an approved system must be installed in 2010 and in substantial use by the practitioners.  Failure to meet these criteria will reduce the care provider’s compensation by $18,000 per provider in the practice and it continues to reduce each successive year. Care providers need to start now to select and implement their EMRs with the help of a skilled, experienced, and local computer service provider.  This need not cost huge amounts of investment nor change your practice, if it is selected and implemented in a professional manner.  Practices do not need to change their care processes or flow.  With a simple and direct five stage approach, care providers can have the technology enabling their work to improve patient encounters and make their life much better…AND, the government will pay for it.  Why wait? Patients need to be alert to care providers using paper charts and ask the care provider when they plan to have an EMR in place.  Everyone benefits and the cost of waiting or doing nothing is too great. Additional information is available by clicking here:  http://www.beckitsystems.com/medical_er.php