Dr. James K. Fortson is my employer and a physician who did not want to adopt health IT. Now, he’s an enthusiast and avid adopter.
The following interview gives insight into the process and the pressure physicians face in making decisions that affect their businesses and their patients.
How long did you take to choose an EMR and how did you reach your decision?
“I hired a practice manager about six years ago and the idea was introduced to me. As a physician I fought change. I was sticking to paper because that was what I knew. Although I had some basic computer skills, I wasn’t completely knowledgeable of the efficiency of technology. Slowly, and effectively, my practice manager started to introduce different aspects of technology into the practice. We started with scheduling, I was slow to turn over some of the administrative functions of my practice. We looked into some billing and collection options. For several years we took the path of least resistance.”
What does that mean?
“Well, whatever we already knew. If the biller suggested software, I went with it. I just looked at the bottom line. But medicine was changing. There were best practices, performance improvement, the need for a leaner practice. Practice Fusion was introduced by my administrator within the last year. I was slowly able to see how she had incorporated scheduling, billing, correspondence. Over the past two to three years our profession has been under more pressure to take on EMR in order to increase efficiency and decrease errors. Then she introduced cloud computing, whatever that was. She was able to pull a lot of different technological pieces of the puzzle together for me.”
What have your experiences been so far?
“I think that as a physician we can be easily bamboozled, hoodwinked, and taken advantage of. We were approached by the hospital, which said, ‘oh, we have this EMR and we will make it cheaper for you.’ But there were a lot of hidden costs for maintenance. We were easy targets because, one, we didn’t know the technology and two, we were being forced to change over a short period of time. While looking at some, none seemed to have all of the things that were geared to my practice as a specialist. They weren’t very customized or they weren’t specialty-specific enough for me.
“Like many physicians, I was reluctant. However, after having learned some of the technology associated with Practice Fusion, I saw some method in the madness. Like being an intern, there was a learning curve, but once I started to apply the technology – like going from an intern to a resident – things started to make sense. And they became much less of a struggle. The system seems to be both cost and time efficient.”
Camille Williams
Camille is the Office Manager for ENT Associates of South Atlanta. She is a veteran of the Silicon Valley dot-com bubble meltdown and a former journalist for The New York Times and the Detroit Free Press.
