Skilled Data Entry, An Extra Burden On Medical Assistants?!

Implementation of EMRs has necessitated a lot of data entry like lab values, medications, allergies, family history, social history, etc. Previously, before EMRs, if the physician wanted to see the chronological difference in a lab value, he would just take the printed sheets of the lab values of different dates and look through them. EMRs have made it easy for the physician to check the chronological difference by providing options to enter lab values such that, the physician can just look at the list of lab values in the order of their dates and observe the difference in a single click. What took them 3 to 5 minutes previously, now takes them less than a minute to just check it out. Other data like medications, allergies also are now meticulously updated into the EMR such that the doctor can check the recent updates in a single click.

If a new patient comes to the clinic, the doctors, along with updating the visit note, have to enter the family history, social history, past medical history, which they get from the patient’s previous medical records. Now with EMRs, the doctors have the option of getting somebody else to update these and keep the note ready for them to just enter the chief complaint, history of present illness, review of systems, physical examination, and assessment and plan, which are usually done by the doctor. This saves them a lot of time. All these data entry requires knowledge in medicine and only medical assistants can do these and that is why the term skilled data entry. Since the implementation of EMRs, most of the medical assistants spend more than 80% of their time in front of the computers doing data entry.

Doctors are already facing delays and are seeing less number of patients because of EMRs and now without the much needed help of medical assistants, it is getting even more difficult to see patients as per the schedule. A few doctors have started thinking about utilizing the medical transcription industry for these skilled data entry works so that they can utilize their medical assistants more effectively to see more patients. Seyyone Software Solutions is one such company with nearly two decades of experience in medical transcription which has fortunately pioneered in such data entry works and has been doing it for most of its clients to their utmost satisfaction. Hopefully, more and more doctors would seek to outsource such data entry works so that they may overcome the difficulties they face with EMR and get back to their original form and serve more patients, which is and always have been their ultimate goal.