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EHR a Saint at Volunteer Practice
August 1, 2008
St. Vincent de Paul Village Family Health Center, a not-for-profit group practice staffed by volunteer physicians, wanted to implement an electronic health records system. But to fund the purchase of the software, related hardware and network technology would require “a wing and a prayer,” says Teresa Simms, health services program manager.
The practice, a part of the San Diego-based Father Joe’s Village organization that offers services to the homeless and indigent, was having difficulty maintaining paper charts for the 2,800 patients it cared for each year. This not only caused daily workflow interruptions, such as misfiled charts or papers, but it also had long-term ramifications, including difficulty pulling diagnostic data from the charts for grant funding applications, Simms says.
“When you have 200 volunteers charting, it’s hard to get everyone to do it the same way,” she says. “We looked into some health I.T. grants to help us purchase an EHR. But it would have been difficult to come up with even $150,000 on our own because something else would have not been able to happen.”
St. Vincent executives also were concerned about how they would train all their volunteer physicians—many of whom are in the residency program at neighboring University of California San Diego—to use an electronic records system, Simms adds.
But during the practice’s EHR evaluation process, one vendor offered to donate 15 licenses and implementation services for its software. The deal required St. Vincent, which has eight exam rooms on the first floor of one of Father Joe’s Village’s facilities, to pay for training services plus a monthly fee for system maintenance.
In early 2005, St. Vincent implemented the EHR and practice management system from Practice Partner, which was later bought by McKesson Corp., San Francisco. Now its physicians use the software, and its registration, order entry, document management and billing functions, each time they treat a patient. The practice also uses a database query tool it purchased from San Jose, Calif.-based Business Objects to gather data from the system for its grant applications and other regulatory reporting requirements.
Further, it’s been able to use the EHR and reporting tool to create quality of care and benchmarking programs to measure how its patients are faring in various areas.
“The system has helped us save 80 hours a year in preparation for reporting and fund raising because we can get the information out of it that we need,” Simms says. “It’s also helped us streamline our clinical workflow and billing to state and federal social services programs so much that we were able to cut back on staff.”
Achieving Efficiencies
Not-for-profit group practices have many of the same needs for an EHR as for-profit groups and can use the software to achieve similar workflow efficiencies and cost cuts, says Chuck Sicher, director at Healthia Consulting, Minneapolis, a unit of Ingenix.
Because physicians in residency programs are accustomed to using multiple EHRs, they expect to have access to records software when they volunteer at a not-for-profit clinic, he adds.
“EHRs in not-for-profit groups are just as common as those in other practices,” Sicher says. “Much of the practice of medicine is driven by registration and billing appropriately for what’s covered by insurance for each patient. So not-for-profit practices need to ensure their system will accommodate the amount of patients they have that are insured by a federal program. But they are the same as other practices independent of that.”
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