He says learning about a patient’s progress, or problems—like where they’re having pain, and what helps with it and what makes it worse—from a precompleted electronic form is a time saver.
“This takes a few minutes of my office visit,” he says. “When this is done for me in advance, I have a couple of extra minutes. I can use that time for other purposes with the patient, addressing other issues, and being a better doctor.”
His office soon plans to introduce a new form patients will be able to fill out and have their Routine Assessment of Pain Index Data 3 (RAPID3) automatically calculated.
Arthritis Associates office manager Dawn DeCelles says patients have responded well.
“We’ve gotten a lot of good feedback,” she says. “There’s not a whole lot of people who want to fill out forms, but when you … explain the technology to them, it’s ‘Oh really? Wow.’ ”
She says it’s helped with satisfying the federal Meaningful Use requirement on EHR use.
“I think it’s great. It’s really helped us to achieve some of those key measures for Meaningful Use, which is very big right now,” DeCelles says. “Because it’s hard to get the staff to remember to click in every little box and even get the information from the patient. So to me it’s been a huge [help] in obtaining that.”
Thomas Collins is a freelance medical writer based in Florida.
