Having trouble keeping your patients’ EHRs up to date? Let Kara help.
That’s the answer OrthoIndy, one of the largest orthopedic practices in the U.S. and the official orthopedic provider for the NBA’s Indiana Pacers and the WNBA’s Indiana Fever, came up with when they realized how many extra hours many of their physician’s were putting in catching up with their charting after a long days of seeing patients.
Kara is an “AI mobile assistant” developed by IT vendor Saykara. More specifically, explained our colleague Bill Siwicki recently at HealthcareIT News, it’s an app on OrthoIndy’s providers’ iPhones that “brings up the physician's patient lists for the day, and the doctors just tap a patient's name and talk. They can use it ambiently during an encounter, either in the exam room or during a telehealth visit. They just turn it on and the app records the conversation with the patient.”
They also can use it post-encounter by just tapping a patient's name and dictating a brief summary.
In addition to the extra hours, Siwicki notes, physicians falling behind on charting “means the practice is not completing all of its back office responsibilities in a timely fashion, including insurance claims submission and billing. This has a downstream impact on business operations. It also can become difficult for physicians to recall all of the details of a patient encounter days after the fact, which can translate into documentation that is less comprehensive than desired.”
As Dr. Timothy Dicke, president and CEO of OrthoIndy, explained, "Some of our physicians had been using basic speech recognition software like Dragon in conjunction with the EHR. Some had been using traditional dictation in combination with a transcription service, while others had a live scribe in the exam room documenting encounters in real time.”
But none of those solutions really fit the bill.
Now, said Dicke, “"We can place orders through the app, we can arrange referrals, we can prescribe meds, and the technology does the rest. It produces a fully structured note, which goes directly into our Allscripts electronic health record."
The result of turning to Kara, he said, is the complete elimination of after-hours charting.
“The solution has had a very positive impact on work-life balance. Many (of our providers) have said they feel more relaxed with their patients, they have more time to spend with their patients, and they no longer experience the anxiety they used to feel from the burden of the documentation. This is possible because the physicians using Kara no longer have to interact with the EHR or do manual data entry."