Lessons learned along the way: Clinical pearls for PCPs

I would like to introduce you to an exciting new feature from Healio: Clinical Pearls for the Front-line PCP.

I am a recently retired internal medicine physician. I practiced for more than 35 years in the Midwest and most recently in the Mountain West. In my many years of practice, I had more than 120,000 office visits and picked up a lot of “pearls” and efficiencies along the way. I have had a longstanding interest in office-based workflows, practice efficiency and a systems approach to providing optimal care for patients.

Why is a regular column like this needed? With our rapidly aging, increasingly more complex patient population in primary care, PCPs are having to do more in less time often with less staff. Also, there is a growing shortage of PCPs as well as specialty care physicians. Staff turnover is being increasingly seen across the country as well. All of these changes make a column like this timely and critically important.

You might be thinking, what’s in it for me? Why should I take time to read yet another article on a topic “just in case” I see this condition? What I will try to do every month is to introduce you to a topic, starting with a common vignette. I will cover the basics, highlight useful tools and include helpful resources for patients and families.

Most importantly, I will map out a workflow for rooming staff and PCPs who will help make that visit more efficient, more comprehensive and more easily documented in the record. These columns will be practical and easy to use on the front line, in your office, this afternoon.

We will cover a wide variety of topics that you see on a regular basis. Each topic will highlight what information can be gathered from the patient’s history by the rooming staff prior to the PCP entering the room. It will help the rooming staff be able to more succinctly explain the reason for the visit to the PCP. Using electronic medical record “smartphrases” for both the rooming staff and PCP will make documentation easier and more complete. Standardized diagnoses and treatment options will be readily available at the point of care. Useful patient resources and information will be available to give to the patient and their families. It will create what I have called over the years “the ideal office visit.”

If implemented, the workflows in this series should help energize the care team, offload some of the burden among PCPs, leverage the EMR better and improve PCP and staff satisfaction.

Above all, it will help patients get the care that they need.

I hope that you enjoy these articles and find them useful. Please let me know if you have any suggestions to make this column more relevant to you, the front-line PCP, by emailing me at philip.bain59@gmail.com.