Should A Physician Pre-Chart For Outpatient Visits?

There is a subtle difference between inpatient and outpatient medical practice that nobody ever talks about… time management. With inpatient practice, you see patients at your own pace during rounds and if you want to stop for a moment to have a cup of coffee or speak with a colleague, it doesn’t disrupt your workday. But with outpatient practice, you can work leisurely at your own pace before office hours and after office hours but during office hours, you are in a constant state of demand for time efficiency.

In my own practice, my office hours come in 4-hour blocks, either 8:00 AM to 12:00 noon or 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM. During those blocks, I schedule 15 minutes for return visits and 45 minutes for new patient visits – every minute is scheduled and the only way that there is a break is if one of the patients doesn’t show up for their appointment. During that 4-hour block, I have nurses, schedulers, and registration staff who all need to be working in order for the office to function in a financially viable way. But for them to stay constantly busy, I have to be constantly busy.

10 years ago, before we adopted an electronic medical record, each patient would have a paper chart and I would make a few shorthand comments on a piece of progress note paper and then at the end of office hours, dictate letters to the referring physician for each patient, clean up my orders for the day and fill out billing sheets. In other words, I “back-loaded” my work day with a couple of hours of charting after I was done seeing patents. Once we adopted an EMR, I tried to do a lot of that work while I was in the room with the patient. The result was that I didn’t have as much dictation and chart work after office hours but the EMR documentation encroached on the time that I was with the patients. I continued to allocate the same amount of office time per patient but I seemed to have fewer minutes just talking with my patients. And because the EMR results in the physician doing more of the work of documentation than in the past, I still was spending an hour or two at the end of the day finishing referral letters and closing encounters in the EMR.

This was reflected on my CGCAHPS patient satisfaction survey results. Patients were happy with the care that they got but they were not happy about the time they spent in the waiting room when I ran behind and they often commented that they didn’t get enough time to spend with the doctor once they were in the exam room.

So 5 months ago, I tried a different approach, pre-charting for my outpatient visits. The day before my office hours, I start my progress note for each patient by selecting the appropriate return visit note template (I have different templates for different diseases: one for interstitial lung disease, one for asthma, one for COPD, etc.). I pre-populate any new test results and pre-populate my final “impression” by pasting in the diagnoses that I manage for that particular patient from their previous note. For new patients, I insert the appropriate new patient template (again, I have different templates for different pulmonary conditions) and pre-populate the note with any test results, radiograph image review, pulmonary function tests, etc. that are available for that patient, either from our medical center or from other hospitals that I can access through the “CareEverywhere” function in our EMR (we use Epic). As a result, I spend about an hour prior to each 4-hour outpatient block pre-charting, sometimes longer if I have a new patient with a lot of records that require reviewing. After 5 months, I’ve found that there are advantages and disadvantages:

Advantages:

1. I am less likely to get behind on my schedule and so my patients are spending less time in the waiting room.
2. I have more time to spend just talking with my patients since I am not trying to furiously type into the EMR as much when I am in the exam room with the patient. As a consequence, I find that I actually enjoy my time in the outpatient clinic a lot more than I used to.
3. I anticipate improvement in two of the CGCAHPS survey questions: During this visit did this provider seem to know the important information about your medical history? and During this visit, did this provider have your medical records?
4. I finish the day’s work earlier because I do less charting at the end of the day by front-loading all of that charting before office hours.
5. I have now started billing CPT code 99358 about 2-4 times a week. This code pays you for review of medical records prior to seeing the patient in the office, as long as you spend at least 31 minutes doing the review. In my own outpatient practice, most of my patients have already had pretty extensive evaluations and in about half of the new patients, I spend > 30 minutes sifting through office notes, lab tests, cardiovascular tests, chest CT images, pulmonary function tests, etc. This pays 3.16 RVUs (about $114 in Medicare reimbursement) and I now find myself getting paid for the work that I was previously doing for free. And this adds up… I estimate that my clinical receipts will increase about $13,000 per year from this CPT, alone.
6. I have x-rays available when I see the patient. Most of my patients are sent to me from physicians at other hospital systems and so most of their chest x-rays and CT scan images are not in our hospital’s computer system. By pre-charting, I have been able to identify where those radiographs were done so that my office staff can contact that hospital’s radiology department and have the images sent over the internet before I see the patient – in the past, I often had to schedule a second visit with the patient just to go over x-ray images that I requested after I first saw the patient for an initial consultation.
7. I have been able to do a “huddle” with the nurses just before the start of office hours to let them know about anything special that they will need to do to prepare for each patient’s visit.

Disadvantages:

1. In the past, I defined my workday as being complete when I finished all of the work for the patients that I saw on that particular day and the administrative duties I had for that day. Because pre-charting is often relegated to the last thing that I do each day (since it is usually the least urgent), pre-charting becomes the task that keeps me at work an hour longer each day and so I now negatively associate it with being the thing that steals my time away from my family in the evening.
2. I often have residents and fellows in the office with me. I worry that by doing the pre-charting, I am detracting from their experience of independently analyzing the patient. Personally, I believe that the trainees learn a lot about how to comb through old records for diagnostic clues efficiently by actually doing it themselves and when I pre-chart, I am depriving them of this opportunity.
3. I’ve created this nagging sense that I am becoming obsessive-compulsive.

Every time management strategy in the outpatient clinic has a trade-off between advantages and disadvantages. I don’t think that pre-charting save me any of the total time I spend on any given week but I don’t think it requires any more of my time either – it just shifts some of the documentation time around from after the clinic hours to before the clinic hours. But I think that it makes both my patients’ experience and my experience with the time spent in the exam room a little better. So, for now, I’m going to keep pre-charting.

November 28, 2018