Question
Why should hearing healthcare practices transition to electronic medical records or EMR? Can Otosuite help with EMR transition?
Answer
Angela Flores, AuD: The federal government and our medical institutions are leading the Electronic Health Record (EHR) and EMR movement toward what the Centers Medicare and Medicaid describe as “Meaningful Use”. “Meaningful Use” is intended to be accomplished in three stages including basic adoption of EHR, care coordination and exchange of patient information and finally, the hope of improving healthcare outcomes. Basically, it’s a push to improve the quality and efficiency of patient healthcare information while at the same time maintaining or improving privacy and security of that healthcare information.
Currently, audiologists and dispensers are not part of the defined professions that can receive federal incentives to meet the goals of electronic health records or EHR. However, to effectively interact with hospitals and physicians we need to meet the same standards and, naturally, the goals of EHR also serve our profession, whether or not the federal government incentives us to meet them.
We also know that our patients expect a certain level of care in a timely manner. We are now living in a digital world so real-time access is part of their everyday experience and expectation.
Lance Brown: Otosuite® is the shared interface for all Otometrics hearing assessment and fitting solutions. If you are looking to connect your audiology patient data to an existing EMR program, Otobase® is a database module that supplements Otosuite and integrates your clinic quickly, simply and securely.
Developing Otobase, we looked at the existing landscape of audiology, and a vast majority of them were using Noah. We wanted to develop an application that allowed professionals to utilize a tool that they are were already very familiar with, and simplify their workflow.
Most audiology software today is Noah compatible and therefore, compatible with Otobase. OTObase enables all Noah compatible equipment to communicate directly with the EMR/EHR.
Integrating with Otobase is seamless, users do not have to learn new software. They do not have to change workflows. They can take and utilize the same tools clinicians use today and automatically integrate into their EMR. With a simple click of a button, they can take the data that they collect within Noah, and send it to an EMR. Users will immediately notice time savings of about 15 minutes compared to their old methods of printing, scanning, etc.
We discussed the practical benefits of an integrated clinic in detail here in our latest interview here. For more information, visit www.audiologysystems.com/otosuite or the Otometrics and Audiology Systems Expo on AudiologyOnline.
