Specialty Wound Care EMR: 6 Areas Driving Critical Value & Compliance

As a healthcare business entity, the outpatient wound clinic operates for a patient population living with complex chronic conditions unlike any other throughout the care continuum. Associated morbidity, decreased quality of life, and, in some cases, mortality are among the many reasons significant interest has been focused on the prevention and treatment of chronic wounds. Care planning requires a multifaceted approach by specialists managing the care and integrating proven clinical practice guidelines. As a wound care provider, the very root of proving one is working within the guidelines of the clinic is found within the data captured using the specialty electronic medical record (EMR). A specialty wound care EMR will capture a granularity of information in a certain workflow that other EMRs simply cannot. This becomes high-value information that proves worth and compliance within the wound clinic.

Furthermore, hospitals seek to open outpatient specialty clinics focused on wound care to support patients living with chronic wounds and to provide a setting that can manage recurring visits. This places a great responsibility on the wound clinic to have competent staff and processes in place to support documentation, patient safety, revenue cycle management, regulations, compliance, clinical therapies and workflows, operational leadership, clinical quality measures (focusing on Meaningful Use and Physician Quality Reporting System [PQRS]), reporting, and data analytics (See Figure 1). To ensure financial success within the clinic, process efficiencies must be in place to manage volume, support outcomes, and drive data/reporting. Utilizing a comprehensive, interoperable specialty EMR, supporting these process efficiencies, is key for the department’s success.1 “Numerous documentation elements are captured for specialty care, which are not always available in standard EMR solutions. Some specialty documentation forms can be template driven, but others require complex algorithms to reflect the steps that specialty clinicians take in their clinical encounters. The views, protocols and order sets are another aspect requiring special design and consideration. It is critical that the specialty content and workflow be analyzed correctly in order to effectively achieve user adoption.”2

This article will address six key components of the specialty wound care EMR that will drive clinical value and compliance in the clinic.

Read the rest of the article at Today’s Wound Clinic.

This excerpt is from an article originally published in Today’s Wound Clinic, written by Cathy Thomas Hess, BSN, RN, CWOCN, VP and Chief Clinical Officer at Net Health.