[MEDITECH-L] Outreach Lab with Meditech (lost 25% of referrals!)
Hoffman Tom
Meditech user community, we need your help!
We have lost 25% of our outpatient lab referrals for pathology professional fees because one physician office in our rural community started sending all of their lab business out of state. Because the out of state company offered the clinic free access to software where they can electronically order, track, and review the results of all lab work they generate (plus many other features), they now send everything to that lab services provider and our community hospital has been hit hard by that loss.
We are a CS 5.54 SR14 hospital since August 2007. We have built Community Wide Scheduling, but are only using it in some departments (not Lab or Rad) within the hospital. We are using POM and AOM in our Emergency Department. We are scheduled to start building PCM (for inpatient doctors) in October, 2008.
At this point, we don’t know any way to leverage Meditech to help us compete with the out of state lab provider. As far as we can tell, Meditech will have a lot of tools for the physician workflow for patients who are at the hospital, but for outpatients, how can we provide tools to clinics/offices to schedule, order, track, and review results?
1. If your hospital is doing this (outreach), what modules are used? (Does LSS play a role?)
2. Can you provide an overview of the best processes used or planned for outpatient lab business?
3. Are you willing to talk with us about how you are helping to keep your referrers to outpatient lab happy?
Another related problem we are facing is that we can’t limit user’s access in the EMR to only patients of a specified doctor or provider group. We do not allow nurses in our local independent doctor’s offices to see EVERY patient in our Meditech EMR. We would like to be able to allow them access to all patients who are associated with the providers in the office where they work. Unfortunately, they can only see them for SEVEN days. In the User Dictionary, on the Administrative/Clinical Tab, there is a field called “Patients for Providers.” According to the help screen for that field, placing the provider mnemonic in that field will limit that user to see only patients associated with that provider. We have found problems with this scenario (like the seven day limitation.) We welcome hearing from anyone willing to share experiences (and setup) regarding providing staff access to EMR for independent physician offices.
This was a long email, if you got to the end, please take one more minute and email hof...@wmh.org your answers to questions 1 2 and 3. It might be a big help to us (and perhaps many other Meditech customers like ourselves).
-Tom Hoffman
Manager of Information Services
Wayne Memorial Hospital
Honesdale, PA
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