By EHRA Clinician Experience Workgroup

In January of this year, CMS adopted new billing guidelines from the American Medical Association (AMA) regarding E&M coding. The new guidelines include a wide variety of much-needed changes focused on streamlining billing processes and reducing clinical documentation burdens.

Seeing this as a watershed moment for clinical documentation and an opportunity to produce shorter, more clinically focused notes, the American College of Physicians (ACP) partnered with the Electronic Health Record (EHR) Association. Together, we examined the practical impacts of the coding changes with our community of vendors and clinical stakeholders, specifically:

1. What consensus about documentation burden exists across vendors, healthcare organizations, and specialist societies when interpreting the guidelines?
2. What questions, if any, exist around the guidelines?
3. How can we effectively educate the community about the impact of the guidelines?

By the EHR Association’s Clinician Experience Workgroup

Today is World Usability Day. On November 14, events around the globe celebrate how developers can make our world easier for all with technology that works to harness human potential. This year’s World Usability Day theme, “Design for the Future We Want,” is inspired by the United Nation’s (UN’s) 17 Sustainable Development Goals—number three on the list is health and wellness. 

EHRA has scheduled its next Usability Summit for January 29, 2020 in Washington DC

Incorporating user-centered design into health IT contributes to better patient care by considering individual users’ preferred style, vocabulary, information visualization, and workflow in software development decisions. The goal is for EHRs to not only be usable, but helpful, such as by integrating clinical decision support, PDMPs, e-Prescribing, and other technology into clinicians’ workflows. (more…)