E-News Exclusives

EHR Training in the Classroom

By Daniel Kivatinos

AHIMA and drchrono teamed up to develop a program to change education and bring down health care costs. The goal is to find a more efficient way to educate students going into the medical field by giving them an EHR platform that will help them better understand practice management, billing, patient monitoring, and more. This partnership allows students in HIM from all around the world to have access to a medical records platform for free. It is game changing for future medical professionals.

The United States spends $3.2 trillion on health care annually, with a percentage of that total being misused because medical professionals throughout the country lack basic EHR training, including how to use the technology efficiently. The AHIMA-drchrono education program will improve training and prepare students going into the field of medicine. Students will feel more confident about their EHR skills and how to navigate successfully through the software.

Medical professionals waste months training their staff on old systems, and many are uninformed that there is an easier and more efficient way to document and manage medical records. Many physicians are using medical assistants to scribe. Having a medical assistant scribe in the exam room allows the physician to focus on the patient, but it is a Band-Aid to the real issue at hand. Many medical professionals don’t know how to use medical software to document. Instead, they rely on medical assistants, which creates disconnects. What a physician and a medical team need is modern medical record software that the whole team can navigate easily, a nicety the AHIMA-drchrono partnership is looking to provide to students.

How It Works
drchrono’s EHR platform is available for free to all health information students going through AHIMA’s Virtual Lab curriculum. The program will benefit all students training to be physicians, nurses, medical billers, and other medical professionals, who can learn the basics of how to use EHR software in just a click and tap on the web and iPhone/iPad. Educators, university professors, faculty, students, billing schools, and others will be given the chance to train on the drchrono EHR platform.

Students will have access to the fully featured platform, unlimited buildable medical forms, customizable settings, enhanced scheduling, and practice management functionality. Students can walk through how to handle specific patient cases and situations in medical software, looking at a patient’s prescriptions, labs, and more. Students can also learn about medical billing and the life of a medical claim, including coding, billing submission, and rejected claims.

This program is ideal for students planning a career in health informatics, nursing, residency, or any similar profession. For example, students training to become a nurse, a resident at a hospital, a medical biller, or a staff member can sign up to use the drchrono platform. Professors who join the program will be given a panel to manage the students. Teachers can walk their students through virtual situations and track their progress on individual tasks such as documenting a patient encounter.

Also, educators can create mock practice simulations, practice encounters, and live tests to determine how well students can navigate through the software. The program includes an abundant amount of sample data preloaded for students and educators to use with the course curriculums.

Schools that have computer programming departments or health informatics programs can enable application programming interface (API) access to better understand how to build on top of the platform. Computer science departments and other technology departments that want API access can set up an account. Learn more at www.drchrono.com/api. drchrono’s health care API documentation is available for review without an account at www.drchrono.com/api-docs.

The way to revolutionize medicine starts with educating medical students with an easy to use yet robust EHR platform. Students should be able to access software to learn from for free. The purpose of this program is to give educators and students a new and different way to learn with the power of a modern medical platform.

The education division of drchrono was created to enable students going into the medical field to understand how to manage the responsibilities of a clinic from any point of view within the practice. This first-of-its-kind rollout between drchrono and AHIMA, which kicked off July 1, is being offered to approximately 10,000 students and 450 universities across the United States and the world. For more information on this program and drchrono’s education division, visit www.drchrono.com/edu.

— Daniel Kivatinos is COO and cofounder of drchrono.

A Bold Leadership Program for a New Era

For Merida Johns, PhD, RHIA, founder of The Monarch Center for Women’s Leadership Development, 2016 marks the culmination of achieving a longtime vision for advancing women’s leadership with the launch of the 100 Committed Women Program to Lead the Future of Health Information Management Program.

The impetus for the 100 Committed Women Program is fueled from Johns’ observations of the difficulty women face in making it to executive positions in all health care sectors and her passion to change that. Some of the challenges facing women’s upward mobility are structural barriers, the lack of policy prescriptions, and support systems. But equally important is the absence of leadership development programs that provide a focused, supportive, and empowering environment where women can develop their leadership potential, take action, and flourish.

Johns realized her vision for creating a pipeline of transformational women leaders to reach executive leadership levels in HIM required a different approach. A bold program for a new era needed to be designed that went beyond programs offering a narrow structure of leadership theories, step-by-step formulas, or “big-bang” three-day workshops. “Leadership is more than a set of skills,” Johns says. “Leadership is a developmental process that lasts a lifetime. And for women, programs must give them support to challenge gender diversity barriers and provide them with the personal empowerment to change the game. The 100 Committed Women program does just exactly that.”

The first of its kind in HIM, The 100 Committed Women program launches December 1. The program uses strengths-based and mindfulness leadership foundations to help women develop personal awareness, leverage their strengths and values, and increase their confidence to promote themselves and take risks to excel as exceptional executives.

Changing the landscape in HIM is no easy feat, since less than 10% of those in the industry hold executive positions. “We must vision the possible. We know this is a phenomenal challenge, and it is one we’re up for! Turning vision into reality at this point is not just a choice; it is an imperative for the profession and for health care,” Johns says.

The 100 Committed Women Program is a rigorous and intensive distance and onsite developmental program focused on the variables most relevant to women’s leadership development.

The program goal is to help women in HIM fulfill their leadership potential and to build a pipeline of women leaders who are ready to assume senior and executive leadership positions in HIM. This is accomplished by developing and strengthening authentic, ethical, and transformational leadership behaviors so that program graduates excel in developing collaborations and coalitions and leading positive change in HIM from the highest organizational levels.

The intensive and rigorous six-month program is composed of three phases and delivered through live teleconferences, group coaching, and an onsite session. Over a 10-week period in Phase 1, participants clarify and expand personal awareness through individual social, psychological, and leadership assessments and facilitated group coaching teleconferences. During a three-day intensive onsite session in Phase 2, participants develop a leadership vision aligned with their values and design an action plan that leverages their strengths to make things happen. The final program phase is focused on advancing a leadership plan. During this 14-week period, participants engage in leadership behaviors on the job and forward their individual action plans through weekly peer coaching sessions and facilitated group coaching teleconferences.

Graduates of the program are expected to advance a personal career agenda for securing senior and/or executive leadership positions in HIM in private/governmental sectors. They are also expected to take on statewide, national, and international volunteer board leadership positions with nonprofit health care-related organizations within 12 months of program completion.

The program is selective and is by nomination or invitation only. “We’re looking for highly motivated and forward-thinking women health information management professionals who have a drive and passion for practice excellence, making a positive impact, and furthering health information management at senior and executive organizational levels,” Johns says.

More information, including program nomination and application forms, dates, and tuition, can be found at www.100CommittedWomen.org.

— Source: The Monarch Center for Women’s Leadership Development