We talk about an evolving profession and evolving our careers in healthcare documentation's future. One that works within EHRs and can utilize our expertise and critical thinking skills combined with our command of the language of medicine in a relevant and contributing way. Trying to look into the future and see what these jobs might look like is not an easy task but it is one that we must begin to contemplate to help us with this evolution and to identify the matching of a very extensive skillset with demands of a system that many of us have not yet seen.
One of the most important things for us to do is to stay involved. Stay connected, continue to network and stay informed on the technology that will form the basis of electronic healthcare delivery. Again, I am convinced that there is a great future ahead for all of us with the knowledge that we have as point and click will not adequately capture the entire patient's story. But what else might we do? Speech recognition is a great tool and can help create tools to use for those who don't want to transcribe in the traditional manner.
The evolution as I see it is one based on getting far more closer to real-time documentation. This is something that I wrote about in a futuristic article in Plexus, July 2008, called Headlines: 2018. The future gets closer everyday and when we try to imagine what that future might look like, we can begin to imagine how we are a big part of the solution to help our colleagues in HIM pull all the parts together. Quality of the entire EHR - dictated reports, clinician entered reports, we can ensure quality and content completeness in all parts of the record. Let's think of chart completion or as we called it in the old days, chart analysis or chart deficiencies done remotely? How about chart auditing done remotely? What if those facilities who use scribes utilized a technology like Blue Tooth and enabled this process to be done just as fast, but remotely?
The challenge is on - let's find those new future jobs and let's step up to fill them. What are your thoughts about how we can help bridge the gap to the allied health professions worker shortage?
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