5 Companies That Make EMRs Easier to Use

by Robin Farmanfarmaian

The American Medical Association partnered with University of Wisconsin’s Medical School to do a study on physician time spent with EMRs. The concluded that physicians spend almost 2 hours on EMRs for every 1 hour of patient care. Think about that – if a physician spends 10 minutes with a patient, they then spend almost 20 minutes with the EMR. Would you rather your physicians spend time with patients, or paperwork?

At a recent Blue Button 2.0 developer event, Amazon, Salesforce, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and Google (Alphabet) all agreed to help make healthcare easier by reducing barriers to technology adoption, especially ones that are enabled through AI and the cloud. Take note of the fact that all 6 of these companies are experts in data integration, AI, search, and with Salesforce in the mix, experts in CRMs (customer relationship management software) as well. CRMs are similar to EMRs, except they are focused on sales and customer interaction for corporations. CRMs gather and aggregate data from many channels, such as email, phone, social media and more, and can allow different people access to specified customer profiles only, in addition to specified data within those customer files. CRMs also allow the user to easily upload spreadsheets of data, or print out beautiful reports analyzing data across the system. Imagine that functionality in an EMR!

Until that day comes when these giants make EMRs significantly easier to use, there are lots of companies that can facilitate using EMRs and expedite workflow. Here are 5 examples:

1. Augmedix
Augmedix can reduce a medical office’s workload by at least 10 hours each week. Thus, the practice can take on more patients and take in more revenue.

This company makes scribes — real human beings — available, and they’ll record your data remotely. These employees are all highly qualified and thoroughly vetted. The physician wears an Augmedix-supplied Google Glass into the patient appointment, which records the visit for future transcription by the remote scribe. Best part, this scribe is assigned to your practice, so they get to know the office and physician’s style, EMR and processes.

2. Athreon
Athreon’s features impressively streamline EMR management. Like Augmedix, this company employs talented people who can quickly transcribe all of your information. These pros know how to use every EMR system in existence.

Athreon’s sophisticated and accurate speech-to-text program, meanwhile, lets you handle your own transcriptions. Wherever you are, you can speak to a mobile device, and you’ll end up with a document, chart or spreadsheet that contains everything you just said.

3. eClinicalWorks
When you sign up with eClinicalWorks, you’ll get your own database. With that database, your EMR will be faster and more scalable, and you’ll experience virtually no costly downtime.

They also have a chatbot called Eva, a sophisticated virtual assistant that responds to questions and commands. Eva can take notes and make appointments as well.

4. iScribe
iScribe gives you an app that records what you say and properly stores that information in your EMR. Then, when a patient comes in for an appointment, you can instantly call up all of their data or just the specific statistics you want to review.

As an AI program, the iScribe app learns and gets to know your voice over time — your speech patterns and idiosyncratic pronunciations. Therefore, the more it’s used, the more precise it becomes. Because it is accessible from a mobile tablet, the HCP can look directly at the patient as they’re entering EMR info. The alternative is staring at a computer monitor screen while a patient speaks, which can be off-putting.

5. NueMD
NueMD solutions reduce bookkeeping duties to a few taps or clicks. Like other programs on this list, this software also makes it easy to request tests, enter facts and figures, write prescriptions and generate reports.

What’s more, all of your patients can have their own NueMD portal, where they can see their lab results, list of medications, upcoming appointments and more. As a result, your office will field many fewer calls from patients, greatly saving time.

There are many more AI software solutions on the market, and under development. You can use what exists today, wait for the Amazons and Microsofts to conquer interoperability, or you could think old-school corporate. Old-school executives used to have their own transcription assistants and/or typing pools to do data entry. Medical practices can use that same concept, and hire EMR transcriptionists, at a much lower paygrade than physicians, to physically accompany the physician at every patient’s appointment, in order to enter all the data into the EMR. If this frees the physicians up to see more patients every day, the increase in revenue can more than make up for the extra employees.

Regardless of what options practices and hospitals choose to utilize with their EMRs, we all have the same end goal in mind. Finding ways to allow the physician more time to focus on what it really important, the patient.