FirstEMR™ Features

Dashboard

Dashboard is a central point of access that we call the dashboard. It provides a graphical, intuitive desktop metaphor that is customizable by the user. For example, a medical assistant may want to initially see the Today's Appointments window and the Patient Vitals window when logging on so that a patient can be checked in and vitals recorded. The physician who sees the patient may want to initially display the patient's records and select an encounter note to document the visit.

 

You can quickly access all the major modules in the program, calendar, tasks, view reports, read/write memos and launch FirstEMR™.

 

 

 

Workflow Monitor

The Workflow Monitor provides an easy-to-use graphical display of the office workload that lets you track the flow of patients throughout your office and the time a patient spends in each location. Using the Administration Utility, you can configure multiple workflows that track various types of processes and activate the appropriate workflow automatically based on the appointment type.

 

 

 

Patient Registration

FirstEMR™ makes registration intuitive, efficient, and virtually error-proof. It provides a single patient registration record for all care settings and patient types - allowing patients to receive care from different facilities/physicians without providing the same information repeatedly. Tailored workflows, wizards, and extensive error checking help users complete registrations swiftly and accurately, while HIPAA-compliant electronic eligibility and address verification help ensure accurate billing. Rules-based work queues efficiently organize follow up activity according to flexible criteria, targeting problem registrations and delegating follow up to the appropriate staff. Patients benefit from fast, efficient service, and your organization profits from high productivity, rapid reimbursement, and increased customer satisfaction.

 

With great features like patient pictures, custom fields, notes, multiple insurer tracking and patient balance reminders, it incorporates a comprehensive audit trail so you will know when a change was made to patient record, what was changed and who changed it and why.

 

 

 

Patient Information

The Patient Record window provides information about patient acute and chronic illnesses, allergies, family history, habits, health maintenance, hospitalizations, immunizations, medications and occupation. Population of these tabs can occur through automatic feed from the encounter note, from direct data entry, or from both methods. To facilitate easy and quick viewing of the data, an additional tab is provided so that each user can customize the display to individual preferences.

 

FirstEMR™’s intuitive interface makes it easy to enter in and recall your patient’s information. With features like pictures, customer fields, notes, multiple insurer tracking and patient balance reminders. It also incorporates a comprehensive audit trail so will know when a change has made to patient record what was changed, who did it and why.

 

 

 

Vitals and Growth Charts

A Vital Signs entry window is available for you to enter vital statistics such as temperature, pulse, respiration, blood pressure, height, and weight, and to review a history of vitals. Vitals are automatically recorded in the patient summary information. Standard growth charts are also available for pediatric patients. The Vitals function computes percentiles for height, weight, head circumference, and BMI.  These values are stored in the database and are available to for retrieval in alert rules and forms.

 

  • Capture chief complaint, history of present illness (HPI), vital signs and medical history; include multiple reasons for visit

  • Pull forward relevant data from previous visits, including stored diagnostic tests such as ECGs

  • Create physician-specific review of systems or chief complaint lists

 

FirstEMR™ offers vital entry, including the ability to print plotting patient growth chart information directly on the based on male/female growth charts for all the charts including height and length, head circumference, stature, body mass index etc.

 

 

 

Encounter Documentation

The Encounter Processing window lets you select a form on which you can record information about a visit using a keyboard and mouse or an electronic pen and tablet that provide the look and feel of handwriting on paper. Customizable templates interactively prompt for the variables associated with each visit and allow for faster, more accurate documentation. You can include information such as medical clipart, a detailed encounter disposition, and an electronic signature.

 

Customizable pick lists of diagnosis codes, procedure codes, medications, and other orders are available, so that only the information that is relevant for your particular specialty or department is available for selection. You can also dynamically associate diagnosis codes with procedure codes to facilitate billing. A patient problem list provides an audit trail of the chronic and acute diagnoses associated with any encounters for the active patient. The feature lets you set up information that you can use repeatedly for a particular situation.

 

 

 

Encounter Summary

The Encounter Summary window lists all the encounters for a patient, and displays details such as diagnosis, procedures, tests and medications ordered, assigned provider, and vitals. Lists are also provided of In Process (suspended) encounters, and sent and received referrals.

 

 

 

Health Alert/Preventive Care

Enables a clinic to configure rules that checks each time a patient is activated. If the patient satisfies the conditions of the rule, System displays a message. Rules can check any data in the database. For instance, a rule can check the patient's record to determine whether the patient is due for an immunization or screening procedure. Rules can be run on a particular patient or on the entire patient population.

 

  • Preventative health reminders

  • Labs/procedures needing review

  • Medications nearing refill status

  • Outstanding patient messages

 

 

Template Editor

Templates utilize drop-down lists, check boxes, and buttons to speed the data entry process during patient encounters. Each template features standard problems, diagnoses, conditions, allergies, medications, and symptom lists for your specialty to help standardize care across the practice and increase physician efficiency.

 

During implementation, you have the option of selecting from templates that match your style or clinical methodologies and editing them to meet your needs, or you can elect to build new templates from scratch.

 

The Template Editor is a cost-effective way to make changes such as adding new fields, alerts, new screens, clinical pathways, documents, protocols, default fields, required fields, and pick-lists in-house, without programmers.

 

 

 

Coding – Diagnostic and Procedure Codes

The Coder function lets you select ICD9 and CPT4 codes and record them on the encounter note. Users (or a system administrator) can also create a pick list of each user's most frequently used codes and organize them into logical categories. Procedure and diagnostic codes can be linked to expedite billing and patient problems can be displayed while selecting codes. Diagnosis codes are automatically included in the patient summary

 

 

 

Evaluation and Management Code Analysis

E/M coding creates more risk for the practice than any other single factor. FirstEMR™ performs the most detailed E/M analysis ever developed and provides the practice with everything they need to make sense of comparative utilization studies. Using inimitable and proprietary mathematical techniques, FirstEMR™ is the only system to quantify utilization for precise risk assessment and to adjust and normalize the national Medicare database for any payer mix. The results are much more than just a standard 'bell curve' comparisons; our EMR system determines whether the E/M levels reported for each provider appear appropriate commensurate with the level of complexity of the other procedures reported for that patient population and then project the financial impact of properly adjusting E/M coding.

 

 

 

Coding optimization

FirstEMR™'s coding optimization functions help you to maximize third-party payments and withstand audits scrutinizing how well your documentation supports evaluation and management coding.

 

Pick lists, check boxes, and prompts within the patient encounter templates ensure your providers “count” all activities that contribute to the key components of an office visit. FirstEMR™ software then suggests the appropriate code based on the documentation provided. This helps your practice not only avoid potentially fraudulent upcoding, it also helps eliminate the more frequent problem of undercoding, a pattern that can exclude thousands of dollars from your bottom line.

 

Because of the comprehensive nature of the office visit template and inherent documentation, your practice can submit claims confidently, knowing you have chosen the appropriate code level and that your medical record will support you in the event of an audit.

 

Medical coding is one of the most important challenges healthcare professionals face today. Errors in coding can mean lost revenue, audits, and legal penalties. In healthcare, coding equals money. The average physician practice loses $50,000 a year due to incorrect coding. Each year, coding has become more important because Medicare and private carriers have become more demanding. Now, with the implementation of FMS’s Correct Coding Initiative/Policy, there’s no room for error. EHS has embedded the Alpha II CodeWizard in our FirstEMR™ solution to help you address these issues. Alpha II scrutinizes your encounters just like a carrier does, so your reimbursement won’t be compromised or delayed by coding errors. In a batch mode or on a real-time basis as you enter patient charges, it identifies errors and generates a report that specifies the problem and explains the error.

 

Examples of how structured knowledge can improve the care delivery process include:

 

  • Treating diabetes – obtain a comprehensive list of all symptoms to look for and medical tests to be performed.

  • Treating knee pain – query on all related diagnoses.

  • Treating urinary tract problems – compile a comprehensive list of questions to ask the patient.

Treating abdominal pain – performs an intelligent prompt to read all findings, compare them to the intelligent links in the knowledgebase and indicate a possible condition type the symptoms relate back to.

 

 

 

Fax Integration

Fax Integration Services help ensure that prescriptions, documents, template notes, and images are transferred accurately from FirstEMR™ to pharmacies, other physicians, labs, and payers. FirstSuite allows you to send and receive all your office's faxes electronically and attach sent/received faxes to a patient's record. A quick pick list of recipients can be also be created, making it easier to select recipients and keep audit trails on who your faxes were sent to.

FirstFax Integration Services offer:

 

  • User-friendly GUI to set up the fax service/monitor status

  • Extensive logging of all activities

  • Service that does not have to be started or monitored

  • Self-maintaining queue that archives successful/failed faxes

  • Email notifications for failed faxes or if database goes down

  • Automatic recovery with notification of database availability

 

 

 

Graphing

FirstEMR™’s rich graphing capabilities give you the data you need in the format that communicates results most effectively. Dozens of graph types, such as bar graphs and pie charts for comparisons or line graphs for trending, allow you to analyze data over time from a variety of perspectives.

 

With this data at your fingertips and presented in ways that highlight important information, you can evaluate many variables that affect the quality of care and productivity of your practice. For instance, you can compare turnaround time on lab orders, track patient compliance in attending disease-specific clinics (e.g., Coumadin management), or chart practice-wide blood values to analyze treatment outcomes (e.g., HgA1C levels in patients with diabetes).

 

 

 

Instant Medical History

Instant Medical History offers patients an electronic method to begin completing their medical history prior to the encounter.

 

Accessed either on waiting room computer or over the web from the patient's home, this time-saving patient interview software integrates with FirstEMR™. Patients respond to multiple choice questions that branch based on their responses. In the background, the software translates the interview summary into clinical terminology that's passed to the EMR.

 

Physicians can quickly review the information and then conduct a more efficient office visit. This allows both the patient and the doctor to immediately focus on the health concerns presented.

 

With Instant Medical History, practices can:

 

  • Reduce the office visit time

  • Reduce data entry time

  • Increase number of patients seen each day

  • Enhance patient communication and satisfaction

  • Increase the documentation quality significantly

 

Questionnaires are also offered in Spanish, and the information is presented to the physician in English.

 

 

 

Order Management

Computerized physician order entry (CPOE) reduces medical errors and simplifies the practice of medicine by eliminating paper transmission of laboratory and other diagnostic results, thus streamlining the patient care process.

 

The Order Management function provides a graphical window where you can generate laboratory, radiology, ancillary, and pharmacy orders. You can selectively access a master list of medications and tests, or you can work with customized lists of your favorite or most frequently used medications and tests. You can also search for drugs in the drug database using their generic or brand names, or both. You can place orders individually or by using customizable user sets. Drug interaction checking, drug leaflets, and expert text are available to help in decision-making when ordering drugs.

 

Through the use of the Gateway, you can gather test results and present them for review. Each result is indexed by date and description for easy access. You can copy any part of the result into an encounter note, using simple cut and paste techniques. You can also link an orderable test to its expected result.

 

Physicians can also use it for instant access to results, patient information, and transcribed documents stored in an electronic clinical repository along with notification and detail of abnormal findings and reference ranges. In addition, FirstEMR™ captures and follows vital signs, including pediatric normative growth charts. Most importantly, it can reduce errors and rework by automating order processing and can help physicians leverage the latest patient data to augment their decision-making process and provide the best care to their patients.

 

Benefits:

 

  • Improves patient safety and patient compliance

  • Reduces pharmacy callbacks

  • Increases revenues

  • Enhances healthcare decision making

  • Decreases chart pulls

  • Reduces the turnaround time for results review

  • Streamlines office efficiency

  • Reduces medical errors

  • Decreases cost

 

 

Lab Order System

FirstEMR™’s lab module saves you valuable time and money by enabling you to order labs and receive results electronically.

 

Through pick lists and check boxes, physicians can order studies and tests with a few clicks of the mouse. The orders are transmitted directly to the appropriate party, either directly through the EMR if the colleague is also a system user or via the application’s fax capabilities. You can set up alerts in the module that let you know when results have been received and further track labs by patient, order date, or provider.

 

Another valuable feature of the Lab Order Entry and Results Reporting tool allows you to review authorization and facility rules by payer to ensure your requests comply with relevant guidelines.

 

 

 

Prescription System

Imbedded within FirstEMR™ is a complete medication database, designed specifically to enhance patient safety. The module minimizes risk by automatically checking new prescriptions against a patient's medication list and recorded drug allergies to help prevent interactions and/or medication errors.

 

After a prescription has gone through this checking function, one of two things happens:

  1. If a potential problem has been identified, an alert is generated to notify the physician so that changes to the prescription can be made, if necessary;

  2. If the order triggers no warnings, prescriptions are immediately generated and either printed at the practice’s checkout counter or faxed directly to the pharmacy.

 

 

Radiology/MRI Orders

Using our CPOE System, order can be placed for Radiology services or ultrasound services. System places the orders and also monitors the reply back from the Service Centers for completion of the orders.