Lemak Sports Medicine Adopts ComplyMD Surgeon Notes

When world class athletes are sidelined, they find Dr. Lawrence Lemak for his orthopaedic expertise. When a world class doctor seeks to improve his documentation, he finds ComplyMD. The solution to healthcare’s archaic documentation process is ComplyMD Surgeon Notes. 

 

“I haven’t seen a noteworthy change in any type of documentation solution since the dinosaur system I saw in 1970″, said Lemak. “We’ve chosen to implement ComplyMD at Lemak Sports Medicine because it’s a type of documentation process we’ve never before seen – and we like it. ComplyMD will revolutionize the way we document our procedures.”

 

Lemak Sports Medicine, located at Brookwood Hospital, consists of three practicing physicians and three fellows. ComplyMD Surgeon Notes is a great fit for Lemak because of their high volume of orthopaedic cases. Scheduled for an early summer implementation, ComplyMD will shift the cumbersome, antiquated process of documentation from redundant dictation/transcription to a smart, physician-friendly tool. ComplyMD enables the vivid documentation of patient health and accompanying procedures, immediately generating complete and accurate data that is instantly available to both his office staff and the hospital/facility staff. The value of ComplyMD’s artificial intelligence intrigued Dr. Lemak. The system adapts to his team’s documentation behavior, allowing them to focus more on patient care and still generate a compliant and complete operative report.

 

“Dr. Lemak is known for excellence in healthcare. We’re delighted he selected ComplyMD Surgeon Notes to be a part of his successful practice,” said Curtis Palmer, CEO of ComplyMD. “His extensive experience will allow us to further develop ComplyMD’s radical process shift in healthcare documentation.”

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ComplyMD allows physicians to vividly document the health of their patients and the procedures administered during their encounters, immeidately generating complete and accurate data for physicians. ComplyMD shifts the documentation process to enhance rich data creation, improve efficiency and maximize productivity in healthcare facilities.

Lemak Sports Medicine: World renowned orthopaedic surgeon, Dr. Lawrence J. Lemak, has played an integral role in sports medicine and arthroscopy research. He specializes in sports medicine, arthroscopy and reconstruction of the knee, shoulder, hip and elbow. As a leader in the field of arthroscopy, Dr. Lemak has published articles in numerous medical journals and has given presentations in the United States, England, Europe, Japan and South America. Many professional sports organizations call upon Dr. Lemak’s expertise as he serves as Medical Director for Major League Soccer, NFL Europe, Professional Golf Association and the Ladies Professional Golf Association. He is also Team Physician for many colleges and universities throughout Central Alabama and the Southeast. He is the National Medical Director for PhysioTherapy Associates, a leader in outpatient physical therapy with over 600 locations throughout the country. Dr. Lemak serves as the Associate Dean of Entrepreneurial Medicine at the University of South Florida, and is a Trustee of Alabama State University.

TAT: Turn Around Time for Transcribed Reports

Turn Around Time. You ask any HIM professional and he/she will tell you that TAT (Turnaround Time) is very important to the operational efficiency of their facility. A snippet in this article says, “strict control of TAT impacts operational efficiency, enriches data capture and documentation, further empowers clinical decision making and enhances patient care.” That’s pretty strong. The article primarily addresses TAT concerning transcribed reports. Many, and I regret to say, most physicians rely on dictation and transcription for their documentation and data capture. Transcription is almost essential to many facilities. But with the advancement of technology these days, wouldn’t one think that this issue of TAT could potentially be resolved (or minimized) with some type of technological application or improvement. I’m not saying “displace transcriptionists” by any means. What I am saying, is that I believe we can make their job easier and more effective towards driving operational efficiency within healthcare facilities. There are a number of ways to do this: templates or “standard” reports, voice recognition software, scribes, etc.

With ComplyMD, we enhance a facility’s operational efficiency with our process application. Our physicians use their standard templates (for their most common procedures), have the option of dictating (for uncommon procedures, in depth/complicated procedures, and specific findings), along with the option of typing in their procedural patient specific data in our user-friendly application.

Efficiency, Comprehensiveness and Cost-effectiveness when comparing Dictation and Electronic Templates for Operative Reports

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1560865

Here’s a great article comparing dictation to electronic templates. The results are pretty amazing. Looking at the time, efficiency, comprehensiveness and cost-effectiveness of the two could turn some heads towards electronic templates.

The study was done in Wishard Memorial Hospital’s (Indianapolis, IN) OB-GYN Department. During the four four-week study blocks, they performed 478 procedures on 440 patients corresponding to 5 selected study procedures. They evaluated the effects of templates on timeliness of completion, comprehensiveness and costs, and effort required vs. standard dictation. 

Most in the healthcare industry would agree that: “Dictated reports are frequently incomplete or delayed.” However, it could take some results like the ones in this article to show that: “Electronic note templates could potentially improve this process.”

“Templates resulted in dramatically faster times to the presence of a verified operative report in the medical record compared to dictation services (mean 28 v. 22,440 minutes). Templates increased overall compliance with national standards for operative note documentation and avoided transcription costs. Documentation with templates took slightly more time than dictation (mean 6.77 v. 5.96 minutes; P=0.036), not including the additional time necessary to subsequently verify dictated reports. We conclude that electronic note templates can improve the timeliness and comprehensiveness and operative documentation while decreasing transcription costs and requiring minimal additional effort on the part of the surgeons.”

Canned Operative Reports: How They Can Work For You

“Advise surgeons to avoid the use of “canned” op reports. You know what these are; all the op reports for a particular type of surgery look exactly the same. Most often canned reports will show up for cataract, pain management, and sometimes gastro-intestinal procedures, but they can occur with any specialty.

Medicare and other payers frown on the use of “canned” op reports to document procedures. They can also be an issue for both the ASC’s and physician’s malpractice insurance carrier—such as when complications aren’t documented in the rare instance when they do occur.

If the physician performs similar procedures and wishes to use some sort of template, he or she must tailor it adequately to each patient’s individual surgery and circumstances for use, and it shouldn’t appear to be ‘canned.’”

“Tip: Avoid ‘Canned’ Op Reports”. Ellis Medical Consulting, Inc. Ambulatory Surgery Reimbursement Update. HCPro. May 2008.

Canned operative reports can work against you, if used in the wrong way. However, our approach to canned reports greatly differs. Many physicians perform the same procedures over and over and over again; therefore, dictating much of the same information over and over and over again, with slight variations here and there according to complications and specific patient information. With repetitious dictation, facilities will incur unnecessary transcription costs for this dictation. Not only is repetitious dictation unnecessarily costly, it’s time consuming for the physician. ComplyMD’s web-based software enables physicians to document procedures (in code-ready language), attaching their own customized canned operative report, already typed and ready to be sent to the coder’s office.