Episode 1792 - Making your documentation reMarkable

Alan Fredendall // #LeadershipThursday // www.ptonice.com 

In today's episode of the PT on ICE Daily Show, ICE Chief Operating Officer Alan Fredendall discusses using the reMarkable writing tablet to reduce daily documentation burden to 5 minutes per day

Take a listen to the podcast episode or check out the full show notes on our blog at www.ptonice.com/blog.

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION

ALAN FREDENDALLHow can we make our documentation more remarkable? Often a very boring topic, but a necessary topic as we are required by law to do a treatment note for every single patient that we see. So today we're going to talk about what is that law that requires us to do those notes. And then we're going to talk about new technology and a new way to think about documentation that's probably going to streamline everyone's documentation in a very significant manner. How can we potentially reduce our documentation burden to maybe five minutes per day?

DO WE HAVE TO DO DOCUMENTATION? So first things first, what is that law that says we have to do a note for every patient that we treat? That law is actually the HIPAA law. Way back in 1996, the Health Information and Portability Accountability Act, or what we know as HIPAA. And so that has a lot of things in it about not sharing protected health information, about in 1996 the emergence of the internet and what we can and can't do with submitting patient data electronically. But the main thing it establishes is that we do need to do documentation on every single patient that we see, and that that documentation be available to be transmitted electronically via fax or email upon patient request. Prior to this law, we just basically handed over copies of paper documentation, and it could be a lengthy amount of time before patients could get access to their records. In this day and age, patients need our notes sometimes for things like reimbursement. If we're a cash-based practitioner and they're trying to get out-of-network reimbursement, they may need it to submit because they got the day off work or something like that. And so there's a lot of reasons why folks may need their documentation and why they may need access to it very, very quickly. So the HIPAA law of 1996 established that documentation must be available to be transmitted electronically immediately to patients or other providers with patient approval upon request. Some of you may have interacted with a patient who needed documentation because they were involved in an automobile accident or something like that and they need that documentation to then send on forward. HIPAA also mandates that we keep documentation for up to six years and that essentially means the best way to do that is to store it electronically instead of maybe in an old filing cabinet. Now the thing about HIPAA is it says that documentation must be available to be transmitted electronically via email or via fax, but what it does not say is that our documentation