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How one documentation project made clinicians, clienps, and even accountants happy
Mental Health Centers of Central Illinois (MHCCI), an affiliate of Memorial Healrli System (Springfield, 111.) is a private, not-for-profit provider of behavioral health and rehabilitation services, serving some 10,000 individuals from multiple locations in six counties that include the cities of Springfield, Lincoln, and Jacksonville.
A longtime user of electronic billing and an early adopter of electronic client records, MHCCI continues to invest in health information technology applications. Since 1 989, when its first billing system went live, it has evolved a sequence of products offered by The Echo Group (North Conway, N.H.), most recendy into the Clinician's Desktop/EHR package.
Burdensome, costly paperwork
In early 2009, MHCCI undertook an agency-wide operations review in response to plunging national and state budgets for behavioral health services. A few months later, tn May, the agency's director of quality management and outcome evaluation, Jim Wilkerson, was asked to join with staff to address a major issue from the review: the growing burden and cost of state-mandated paperwork required for reimbursement of care to publicly funded behavioral health patients.
"Due to financial conditions in Illinois, we were looking at ways to increase revenue, decrease staff stress, and decrease paperwork load. Our staff told us that they had a lot of paperwork to do, something that we well knew, and it became a big discussion," Wilkerson recalls. "That's when we came across this concept of concurrent documentation (CDoc) and we thought, 'Ah, that's a good idea, to work the same way that medical doctors do, charting die entire time [with the patient]. Can we figure out a way to make this happen?'"
"How can we make everything work together?"
With initial concurrent document training and strategic direction from MTM Services (Holly Springs, N.C.), Wilkerson and his team started the project by understanding the time expended by staff on clinical documentation. At the time, he recalls, "We were really in the middle of implementing the EMR," noting that the team was actively working on plans to convert important, paper-based clinical documents (client assessments, treatment plans, progress notes, and more) into easy-to-use electronic forms. Immediately, he explains, "We started thinking: 'How do we do stuff?', 'How does the EMR do...