Expanding a Large Multi-Location Practice - Orthopedic
Meet Jim Griffin
Jim Griffin is the President and COO of
Direct Orthopedic Care (DOC), a multi-state
orthopedic immediate access clinic. He
joined DOC in 2016, spearheading DOC’s
formation into a national practice group. The
practice group is staffed with board-certified
orthopedic surgeons and specialty-trained
physician assistants across 9 locations in
Dallas Fort Worth, Austin, and Southern
California.
Direct Orthopedic Care, or DOC, is a walkin clinic for referral-free, immediate-access
orthopedic care. They want to revolutionize
orthopedic care by giving patients an
“instant care” alternative to the emergency
room or an orthopedic specialist. In the next
12 months, DOC is planning on expanding
with 16 more offices.
The Business Challenge
DOC had a mission: Provide immediate specialty orthopedic care with a focus on the patient experience.
In some ways, they were succeeding. They had already raised the bar by:
-
Extending their operating hours and staying open 7 days a week
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Placing their locations in convenient, high-traffic areas (next to coffee shops and grocery stores, rather than middle-of-nowhere healthcare plazas)
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Cutting out the “middleman” referral process
There was one problem that impacted every aspect
of the business: the EHR system was getting in the
way. Their initial EHR system negatively impacted
and bottle-necked the experience from check-in to
locked notes. This detrimentally affected the patient
experience and the provider and staff experience at
DOC.
The Problems with Their Prior EHR System
Their EHR system was old and complemented by a
gigantic paper binder filled with hundreds of pages
of clinical workflows and documentation. It had no
room for integration with tools that would benefit
the practice.
Each new service DOC used required hours of manual work
Reminder systems, analytics, scheduling--these processes required manual operation.
Providers would almost always be taking paperwork
home to finish the documentation on the day’s
patients. DOC’s already-extended hours of operation
made this post-hour work especially taxing.
Checking in patients greatly delayed the patient
appointment
It required additional manual effort to:
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Collect the necessary documents for signing
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Transfer the physical documents from checkin to the provider for review (prior to seeing the patient)
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And finally, re-enter the information into the EHR
Patients felt the inefficiency of the EHR too
The patient experience is impacted by having to
fill out physical paperwork in the waiting room
(especially as so much of their experience, even filing
taxes, is now digital).
To top it all off, the patient is interacting with a
provider and staff that are likely burnt out from the
tedious, unending daily workload.
The issues were apparent, and DOC knew there had
to be a better way…
The Solution
DOC knew most of their problems could be fixed by
going digital, but they needed to keep operational
costs affordable and wanted an EHR powerful
enough to make the lives of providers and staffs
easier while streamlining the patient experience. A tall
order.
DOC needed an easy-to-use, affordable, high-quality,
100% paperless EHR solution.
They found it in DrChrono.
Performance-Enhancing Improvement for Providers and Staf
With DrChrono, DOC was able to completely digitize
their intake process, reducing their intake time by
68%.
Then, DOC was able to reduce their workload
substantially, to the point where all staff members
were able to finish all of their notes before leaving the
practice premises. They jumped from “guaranteed to
take documentation work home”, to a 96% same-day
locked note rate with most notes signed and locked
within 30 minutes of clinic closing.
DrChrono EHR cut DOC’s documentation time
by 28%. Providers could finish their digital
documentation as they finish seeing their patient.
This had two big impacts:
-
Documentation finished at point-of-care yielded more accurate documentation
-
Employee satisfaction increased because providers and staff had a more manageable workload when working through the DrChrono EHR
As an extra bonus, DrChrono reduced DOC’s training
time by at least 75%. DrChrono is intuitive and easy
to use; new team members at DOC could pick up the
EHR and intuitively navigate the workflow with little
outside instruction. DOC has also seen a dramatic
decrease in provider calls to the help desk.
A Noticeable Boost to the Patient Experience
The improved employee satisfaction bleeds into the
patient experience. Patients are experiencing more
satisfied staff and providers, making for a more
pleasant encounter.
DrChrono improves the experience in other ways,
too: When patients arrive, they’re no longer tasked
with filling out paperwork. Instead, they’re using
iPads to check-in. Patients also have the ease of
online scheduling.
And from an aesthetic standpoint, they see a wireless
office instead of an office cluttered with papers,
gigantic binders, and wired desktop computers.
A Highly-Affordable EHR Solution
For their “retail” model to work, DOC needed an affordable total cost of ownership.
Prior to using DrChrono, DOC subscribed to a Transcription service.
Once they switched to DrChrono, they were able
to cancel that service and use the savings to pay
for their entire DrChrono subscription. DOC had a
minimal change in cost and a maximal change in
workflow and staff and patient experience. DOC saw
their ROI within months of implementation.
Conclusion
With the help of DrChrono, DOC is facilitating major changes in orthopedic care.
They’ve succeeded in implementing their vision of
non-referral, immediate-access orthopedic care,
and they found an EHR that lets them streamline the
clinical process from check-in to locked notes. And
they did it while keeping their total cost of ownership
lower than any other system they’ve evaluated.
Aside from being the best choice for a high-quality,
low-cost EHR system, DrChrono scales as needed.
Even as DOC continues to expand, they have no
plans of switching to a new EHR system.
“When we switched to DrChrono, we knew this was
going to be our last switch because we’re planning on
becoming the largest orthopedic provider in the US,
and we know that the platform is built for the future.”
- Jim Griffin, COO and
President of Direct Orthopedic Care