Making rounds in sub-acute care is a bit like juggling while walking. You're seeing multiple patients at various stages of recovery and executing multiple care plans. You're also coordinating with a multidisciplinary team to ensure continuous monitoring and treatment of patients. While making rounds, you often tackle multiple responsibilities based on patient needs, such as assessing a new patient, managing wounds and injuries, and evaluating another patient for discharge — all in one morning.
You’re probably using a single electronic health record (EHR) solution to manage each patient, but you could do your job more effectively with a specialty EHR that offers the specific workflows you need to manage your rounds. Imagine cooking a multicourse dinner: you would use different knives for mincing, chopping, and cubing. Just as a classically trained chef needs specialized tools for each task, you need a sub-acute EHR solution tailored to streamline your rounds.
The Challenges of Rounding in Sub-Acute Facilities
Because sub-acute care involves complex cases, you are constantly shifting your mindset from one patient to the next. It's like speaking a different language to each person you encounter, which can be mentally taxing. During your daily rounds in sub-acute care, you may:
- Evaluate patients and track their progress
- Coordinate with multiple caregivers based on treatment plans and patient goals
- Manage and adjust medications
- Update care plans
- Communicate with family members as needed
Coordinating care in a sub-acute environment can be challenging. Your patients often have multiple conditions that require comprehensive treatment for each. Due to the complexity of these cases, you usually work with a group of specialists, including speech therapists, occupational therapists, and skilled nurses.
When each patient sees multiple specialists, you have to understand various terminologies and adjust your checklists accordingly. For example, if one patient has experienced a stroke, you'll need to assess their neurological function, and you might incorporate seizure protocols in your evaluations. For a patient with a heart condition, your visit will be different. For each case, you take detailed notes to pass on to other members of the care team so they have a complete picture when they begin their rounds.
Sub-acute care can also pose billing challenges, particularly with recent changes from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). The new Payment Driven Payment Model (PDPM) changes how you bill for sub-acute services in skilled nursing facilities. Under this payment model, CMS requires detailed charting to ensure bills match accurately with treatment records.
The right EHR system lets you capture all the data you need for billing, so your claims aren’t rejected. However, a clinic based EHR solution may not have all the codes you need, so you add notes and have your billing team reconcile all the information before submitting a claim, which can be time-consuming.
Why a Specialized EHR Makes Sense
Let’s revisit the chef in the kitchen. Using a single EHR system for every patient is like using the same knife for each step of meal prep. While you could use a chef’s knife to cut bread or a paring knife to carve a turkey, relying on one tool for all tasks can make the process much harder than it needs to be. In sub-acute settings, you need specialized EHR solutions that meet the unique content and documentation needs of each specialty.
Using a single EHR may not give you the workflows you need to accurately input codes, labs, values, and other vital information, so you constantly have to make additional notes. A single EHR system may also lack the specific forms or codes you need to create detailed patient records. With a specialized EHR, however, you can customize it to suit how you capture, access, and use data.
As a sub-acute provider, a specialized EHR gives you these customization options and other features that can make patient care more seamless across providers. You could access a unified database of terminology so each specialist has a clear view of the patient's condition.
Using specialized EHR solutions lets you capture all vital data accurately, helping cut down communication errors that could delay care or complicate a patient's transition from one provider to another. For example, if your patient is ready to move to post-acute care, retrieving information from multiple health record systems can prolong the process. Administrators need to consolidate all patient records and attach them to the transfer paperwork, which may cause delays.
Addressing Concerns About Multiple Systems
Some providers may worry about managing multiple systems or integrating data. Specialized EHRs like ChartPath can help solve these challenges by working seamlessly with commonly used clinic-based tools. These systems integrate with your existing software, reducing the administrative burden often associated with managing multiple platforms. It’s similar to having a butcher block in the kitchen: it provides the right tools for each task without duplicating what you already have.
Overcome Challenges in Sub-Acute Care
Using a clinic based EHR to manage multiple patients in sub-acute facilities can drag down your workflow. You don't have as many preloaded forms and templates, so you spend a lot of time taking notes and reconciling them with your billing system. You’re also likely dealing with fragmented data and systems that don’t integrate well with one another.
Fortunately, you have the solution to these challenges in ChartPath’s specialized EHR solution. Our customizable platform gives you access to all the information you need to create and execute care plans, assess patients during rounds, track progress, and prep patients for discharge. It also helps you maintain accurate charts for billing and compliance.
Curious about how a specialized EHR can make your rounding easier? Discover how ChartPath is designed to meet the needs of providers like you.
