Brockton Neighborhood Health Center Case Study
Brockton Neighborhood Health Center (BNHC) is a non-profit, multi-cultural, community health center that collaborates with community agencies and residents to provide high quality, financially feasible, comprehensive health care responsive to community health needs. The health center is committed to promoting health, preventing diseases, and serving low-income,diverse, and medically underserved patients in Brockton, Massachusetts, and the surrounding communities.
The Case
Being a non-profit community health center, BNHC had a goal to increase access to healthcare services to more underserved people in their community at affordable pricing.
However, the facility was struggling to add more patients to its system. On average, physicians were seeing 12-14 patients a day. Upon reviewing patient workflow, it was found that clinicians were spending a great deal of time documenting each visit into their EMR either during, or after the visit. This time spent entering the chart on the computer directly culminated into a less than optimal patient engagement and patient flow inefficiencies.
Physicians were struggling with the laborious task of entering data into the EMR. After reviewing solutions to help improve access to care as well as provider moral and wellbeing, BNHC selected ScribeEMR as their vendor of choice to outsource the capture of each patient visit’s clinical documentation.
Implementation
ScribeEMR assigned an on-site project manager, and IT resource to the start implementation.
During the first two weeks of implementation, ScribeEMR project and operations managers conducted multiple discovery sessions with administrators and clinical leadership at BNHC to understand the challenges and workflows of its healthcare providers.
Through the course of discovery sessions, ScribeEMR developed a customized strategy for the BNHC enterprise and each provider to help deliver an effective chart completion solution.
Expert medical scribes were trained specifically to work with the BNHC EMR and according to the requirements of BHNC. Each provider was assigned their own scribe that they were to work with every day. Within a few weeks, ScribeEMR were helping BNHC physicians close and sign off charts within a few minutes of each visit.
Upon seeing the initial results, other providers also requested to ScribeEMR have a remote medical scribing assigned to manage their charting requirements. ScribeEMR’s expert team of remote medical scribes has worked cohesively with BNHC since September 2020.
The Impact
🔹 Within the first couple of weeks of implementation, ScribeEMR helped healthcare providers eliminate the burden of data entry.
🔹 All medical charts are now completed in real-time and ready for coding within a few minutes of the patient visit. No chart backlogs, no charting at home during personal time.
🔹Streamlined A/R cycle – faster reimbursement.
🔹 Enhanced patient satisfaction, given the provider now only focuses on the patient and their health and not on a computer.
🔹 Improved provider morale and reduced incidents of physician burnout.
The Butterfly Effect Of Time Saved
🔹 ScribeEMR’s medical scribe are helping each provider save between 5-10 minutes of charting for every patient seen, equating to saving close to 2 hours of wasted time per day.
🔹 The time each provider saves in charting and data entry has culminated into seeing more patients per day, achieving improved access to care and boosting revenue for the facility.
🔹 In one instance, ScribeEMR’s remote medical scribing has helped one provider add up to 40% more patients per day, resulting in an $200,000 additional annual receivables for BNHC.
As noted in the tables, Dr. Sonia Kamal worked 19 days in April 2020 and offered care to 320 patients with an average of 17 patients per day. With the addition of ScribeEMR remote medical scribing services, in April 2021, Dr. Kamal saw 392 patients working the same; an average of 23 patients per day.
Similarly, Francesca Villanueva, NP, worked 18 days total in August 2020 and saw 228 patients. In comparison, she worked just 14 days in August 2021 and saw 298 patients, thanks to her skillful ScribeEMR remote medical scribe, who shared her charting workload and helped streamline her workflow.
