4 Tools They Won’t Want to Live Without
In a recent blog post, mumms looked at how higher turnover in the healthcare field is impacting hospices. 35% of hospice leaders said that staffing shortages were among their top concerns for their organization in the coming year.
As clinicians leave the workforce, reduce hours, and navigate increasingly competitive offers, the right tools are more important than ever in attracting and retaining staff. An EMR that thinks about the clinician’s day and builds in tools to help them manage their workload can make the difference between a happy clinician and one that feels bogged down by technology headaches.
Below are 4 built-in timesavers that will help save hospice clinicians time and hassle during their day.
Escape The “Shoebox Full of Meds”
Entering patient medications at admission has historically been a timely, paper-heavy process. Clinicians must dig through several paper prescriptions (often saved in a shoebox) and hand-key them into the EMR.
Hummingbird’s medication management system, ClearScripts, has SureScripts build in. This prepopulates the patient’s medication history directly in the EMR when the patient is admitted. The clinician can skip hand-key medications and simply review the list and make any changes needed. Just eliminating hand-keying information can save the clinician a minimum of 30 minutes per admission.
Reduce Timely Pharmacy Calls
Calls to the pharmacy can take up a large part of a hospice clinicians’ day. Time spent waiting on hold to reorder meds could be used to complete documentation or spend time with the patient. That is why ClearScripts also allows clinicians to send medications to the pharmacy directly from the system.
For nurses visiting multiple homes, medications can be updated on any mobile device with iPrescribe. iPrescirbe is an easy-to-use mobile app, that lets nurses see and manage medications, send changes to the pharmacy, and syncs all changes back to the EMR.
Make Prepping For IDG A Breeze
The IDG meeting is crucial to hospice. When too much time is spent shuffling through paper and trying to organize the agenda, information can get missed.
The EMR should make the IDG meeting easier. Hummingbird gives teams a pre-populated IDG agenda that pulls in real-time information up until the meeting starts. The agenda easily shows relevant information such as which patients are coming up for recertification. It also shows whether documentation has been completed by the entire IDG team, part of the IDG team, or none of the IDG team.
The team just has to click on a patient, review the relevant information, enter their notes, and move on to the next patient.
Build In Efficiencies To Help Them Chart
Efficiencies throughout the EMR that help the clinician chart, can also relieve some administrative burden. Features such as highlighting required questions and carrying over information from previous charts so it does not have to be re-entered, reduce the manual labor on the nurses.
Hospice nurses have many things to get done in a day so planning is important. Nursing-specific dashboards can highlight what the nurse needs to attend to during their day. Additionally, features like turn-by-turn directions from home visit to home visit, save extra steps, and add important details to planning.
Find the Right Technology
Choosing an EMR that focuses on hospice workflows and building tools to support them, hospices can relieve a large burden on their staff. Using tools that empower nurses in the field leads to happier clinicians!