Is the juice worth the squeeze? Before considering a new project, you want to know if the rewards will justify the efforts. This conversation will open your eyes to some of the benefits that ECG management can provide to your workflow!
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Physicians face enormous challenges in triaging cardiac patients to ensure they receive the appropriate care. When a patient presents with cardiac symptoms—whether in an ambulance, the emergency department, or somewhere else—the physician or clinician needs a rapid, accurate ECG overread to feel confident in the care they intend to order for the patient. But the traditional paper ECG process can be labor-intensive and may take hours or even days to complete. Improving the efficiency of ECG processes can lead to better patient care through rapid report generation and fewer errors in the patient chart, thanks to having a single source of truth for all ECG data.
What is the experience when there is no single source of truth? One facility found that as their ECG volume trended past 100 patients per day, their traditional ECG workflow—getting the paper ECG reported, signed, and returned by the cardiologist, often taking several days—prevented them from delivering high-quality care. Their system also cost money in two significant ways: delayed or lost billings and the expense of ECG paper.
What difference did an integrated system provide? The client set a goal of a 48-hour turnaround time for ECG reporting and processing and achieved 100% cardiologist buy-in for streamlining the workflow through digitization. The integration with the Cardiology Information System enabled the ECG professional to capture an ECG within 10 minutes, as opposed to the 45 minutes the paper-based process required. Not only was it faster to obtain the ECG, but because the tracing could be overread in minutes by a cardiologist in any location, the system generated a rapid, seamless flow of data between all relevant departments.
The facility ultimately exceeded their goal of a 48-hour turnaround, and today they have a maximum 24-hour turnaround time for processing and reporting ECGs. In fact, the client said the ECG results now appear in the patient's electronic medical record before the electrodes are even removed from the chest. This digitization of ECG data has eliminated manual results entry, which, in turn, has mostly removed human error from the process. The facility also uses the Cardiology Information System's one-click "press-to-process" function to ensure that every ECG gets billed at the time of service.
What other benefits did an integrated ECG management system provide? Here's an astonishing fact about the paper costs: The facility discovered that they saved over 200,000 sheets of paper in the first year after switching to a digital ECG system. Not only is that a major expense eliminated, but it's healthier for the environment, too.
Certainly, this facility came to believe that the juice was worth the squeeze. Switching to a streamlined digital ECG workflow enabled them to improve the cardiac care they deliver, reduce costs, and vastly improve collaboration by using a centralized system that allows data-sharing outside the cardiology group through the electronic medical record. That's a big win for the facility and their patients.
