tmccormi wrote on Tuesday, March 05, 2013:
This suggestion comes from one of my customers.
In the following document:
there is a short section commenting on the use of the expression “Patient Seen By the EP” use for several denominator of MU objective.
The EP can define within the scope of their practice when they See a patient and when they don’t as long as they are consistent through the reporting period.
In radiology (and probably in many other specialities) there are a several (actually a majority) of act (CPT code) where the radiologist will never “see the paitent”.
Currently openEMR through its AMC report assume that when a CPT code linking an EP and a Patient that the patient has been seen by the EP.
It would be nice to be able to configure in the Service table a flag associated to each CPT code to determine if the patient is normally seen by the EP for this procedure or not. We would also have to make adjustment in the AMC reporting to account in the denominator only those encounter for which patient has been seen by EP.
For stage 1 and 2 the following objectives are affected
-Demographic
-vital signs
-provide patient ability to view, download, and transmit health info
-patient specific education
-secure messaging
-patient history
-problem list
-medication list
-allergy list
-smoking status
Imagine the impact for radiology where about 20% of encounter would be mark has “Patient Seen by EP”. This mean for 80% of patient you don’t have to gather most of the extra MU data.
To a lesser extent, same goes for “office visit” where openEMR assume all encounter are office visit. It would be nice to configure which CPT code imply an office visit and only consider those encounter for the objective where office visit is the denominator instead of assuming all encounters are office visit.
For stage 1
-clinical summary
for stage 2
-patient reminder
-patient education
-secure messaging (for exclusion)
-patient history (for exclusion)
-electronic notes
Tracking which services rendered imply “an office visit” or "patient seen by EP"could be added and turn on by default for all CPT codes. This way you would conserve the current behaviour of openEMR, but allow some administrator to unchecked some CPT code to specify which encounter should be consider in the AMC report more precisely.
With those changes applied to openEMR we could reduce significantly unnecessary MU data capture for radiologists and continue to comply fully to MU. I believe other specialties may encounter similar benefit.
Tony
www.mi-squared.com / @tonymi2
oemr.org / @OEMR_org