Change of Shift is Up!

Click here for the newest edition of Change of Shift. It's a wonderful compilation of nursing stories on the web. I submitted from NP Place.com this round. Enjoy!

Nurse Practitioner Getting Ready for Meaningful Use and EHR

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Hello once again from The Nurse Practitioner's Place! I have been on a long hiatus due to an injury from a car accident last year. Boy has it been a bumpy ride! I have been playing catch up at the office while trying to decipher my own handwriting which has gotten really bad.

Paperwork is slowly torturing me to death and I am anxiously awaiting the EHR (NextGen) that is coming by June of next year. Let the template building begin! I am just now really starting to pay real attention to "meaningful use" and am not really sure why it matters in the first place. I can see if you got the entire system for free from somewhere and had to show how well you used it in order to prove it's worth. I don't know exactly but I am sure that it's all about government tracking of health care and how well we are taking care of our patients.

Don't get me wrong! Taking care of patients is very important but they are now worrying that we will be "taking care of the computer" instead of them. This will slow us down and speed us up at the same time. Entering all of the relevant data will be a nuisance for a while but once it's in... Look out clarity of information! I was on the Super User committee at the hospital when we first transferred to electronic records and the older nurses really had a hard time getting used to it. Charting by exception is a wonderful thing. I had never understood the reason for writing No this or No that on every visit when you can assume that it's negative except for the things that you do write. I also realize that "not documented, not done" but we all know that there is so much more involved in a patient visit that isn't all spelled out in black and white but in the nuances of the health care provider relationship with their patient. The only way to totally get every detail would be to videotape the visit each time. I couldn't stand having that done because we all would worry more about how we looked than how we took take of our patients.

So.. how many of you have used NextGen? Leave me some comments so I know what I am getting into!