Eyeworld Daily News

EW SHOW DAILY 14 Tuesday, May 10, 2016 ASOA News Today T he news had just come over: In the next 5 years, the number of ophthalmol- ogists is projected to remain more or less the same, hav- ing remained virtually flat over the last 15 years. Over the course of the same 5 years, the population over 65 years of age is projected to grow by approximately 50%, arriving at a number almost double the patient population in 2000. That would mean around 17,350 ophthalmolo- gists serving 341,095 patients. Five years—that's all we've got before ophthalmology clinics begin to look more like warehouses with no room to spare. Access is getting tougher, and clinics and their staff need to see more patients, and do so in a more efficient manner. Jane Shuman, COT, COE, was making the case for increasing the efficiency of patient services in an ASOA symposium on "The Efficient Use of Technology Resources." "In order to service the increasing num- ber of patients, we must become more efficient," Ms. Shuman said. "Streamline manual processes or embrace technology." While Ms. Shuman often speaks on improving manual efficiency, she said that "in this day and age, the 21st century, it's really important that we find other ways that can help us be more efficient and be more productive." She focused on using more tech- nical resources to improve efficiency. Quoting the Merriam-Webster dictionary, she defined efficiency as "The ability to do something or produce something without wasting materials, time or energy." "Think about some of the pro- cesses that take the most amount of time in your practice and how many man-hours you are attributing to some of the tasks that could be automated by doing them manu- ally," she said. "I know that people and practices don't want to invest in technology because it's money. But very often if you justify it in terms of man-hours, and if you're paying your staff overtime in order to get some things done, then it should pay for itself in a certain period of time." Efficiency, she said, will improve the quality and the speed and ulti- mately decrease the costs. Technol- ogy, ideally, should provide a better way to work. This might not always appear to be the case, as happened in many clinics that transitioned to electronic medical records (EMR). EMRs were supposed to make clinics more efficient, providing better documentation, improving speed, allowing clinics to service more patients and therefore take in more revenue. However, with EMRs, clinics did not expect Meaningful Use, PQRS, ICD-10, increased documentation, and audits. In addition, "I have found that very often, in an EMR, the techs are focused on checking boxes as opposed to actually listening to the patients," she said. "As a result we've seen a lot of staff turnover, as some of them thought they could not get onboard with the computer." Last year, Ms. Shuman did a follow-up survey to the ASOA Tech Benchmarking Survey originally done in 2009. This 2015 follow-up confirmed her hypothesis that it took longer to work up patients in an EMR than on paper because the history component took much longer. Whole fields, therefore, often need to be corrected manually. This now is information that needs to be fed back to the manufacturers of EMR systems—these systems could still provide the efficiency we are looking for, but need to be refined, streamlined further to do so. "In order to increase our effi- ciency in absolutely anything, we need to have a proactive workflow," she said. "We've got people, we've got a process, and we have a prod- uct. Together that should be fairly cyclical so that everybody can get the information that we need and do it in the most technologically responsible way." EW Editors' note: Ms. Shuman has no financial interests related to her comments. by Chiles Aedam R. Samaniego EyeWorld Asia-Pacific Senior Staff Writer Technological efficiency Ms. Shuman encourages attendees of her talk to embrace technology to increase efficiency. " In this day and age, the 21st century, it's really important that we find other ways that can help us be more efficient and be more productive. " –Jane Shuman, COT, COE

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