Southern California Solo Practitioner Finds RAPID EMR Key to Better, Faster Notes and Reports
When she opened her independent practice in Long Beach, California in late 2004, Dr. Michelle Zarzana had already experienced professional life in a large, multi-discipline West Los Angeles health care organization as well as in a busy Long Beach chiropractic partnership, and neither of these proved to be the professional experience that she wanted.
What she did want was the opportunity to practice her way – unpressured, spending time with patients, growing at a measured pace, enjoying positive relationships with the doctors, attorneys, insurance companies and adjusters she would deal with, and reserving enough time to herself to live a full and satisfying personal life.
She came to chiropractic later in life than many of her peers, having previously established herself as a marine biologist and researcher and as a teacher. A serious injury had placed her in extended, successful chiropractic treatment and it was so effective that she thought, “…this is where I can do some good….” She enrolled in the Southern California University of Health Sciences (formerly Los Angeles College of Chiropractic), finishing the five year program in three and one-half years and earning her D.C. degree in 2002.
Progressive doctor
Dr. Zarzana regards herself as a progressive chiropractor, with a mission of getting patients well and then maintaining that wellness with a limited regimen of visits for check-ups and reinforcement of her recommended exercise programs.
“I think this approach gets patients better faster and keeps them better,” she says. “Once they are released from treatment, I like to see them once a month for as long as necessary, but not longer.”
Like most of her peers, Dr. Zarzana often found herself bogged down in paperwork -- handwriting and recording daily SOAP notes and later composing and issuing reports to the various attorneys, insurance companies, regulators and referring doctors that required them. She tried dictation and outsourced transcription, but she found the process unsatisfactory and ultimately chose to be her own transcriptionist in preference to suffering the delivery and quality problems that she frequently encountered.
“These reports are legal documents, and they have to be right,” she says. Nevertheless, paperwork was adding the equivalent of a full day of additional work to her schedule each week, crimping her time with patients and seriously impairing her personal time and lifestyle.
Saving Time and Energy
Dr. Zarzana, early on, began looking for a way to save time and energy and in a serendipity moment, the solution arrived with a patient about six months after she opened Zarzana Chiropractic. An employee of nearby ACOM Solutions, Inc., the patient mentioned that the company had begun offering an automated clinical notes and reporting solution called RAPID EMR that was specifically designed for chiropractic offices. The automated solution replaces the typical procedure in which notes from exams and office visits are hand-recorded on daily note forms with paper-based patient folders building from visit-to-visit.
Designed in consultation with successful, well-established chiropractors to meet the specific needs of the chiropractic community, RAPID EMR resides on a tablet computer and features interactive intelligent graphics and checklists for diagnoses and patient progress. The array of interactive screens include, among others, Patient Information, Chief Complaints, Range of Motion, Neurology Exam, Orthopedic Exam, Impairment Rating, Narrative Report, Outcome Assessment Reports and pictorial “Helper” screens for the entire body, the muscles, the spine, acupuncture, auriculotherapy and a genealogical tree. When the doctor taps on a diagram point or check-box, associated text within the RAPID system is generated and sent directly to the patient file.
Handwritten notes are entered using the solution’s “Inking” feature, and if desired, external documents such as photographs and accident diagrams can be scanned into the file, where they are automatically indexed.
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