EHR Education for allied health: Clinical Medical Assistants, Medical Office Assistants and others

The mission of this HUB is to inform and collaborate on how to educate the many hundreds of thousands of allied health paraprofessionals to support the transformation of medical document management. Transitioning from paper-based, simplistic, legacy, non-interoperable and ICD-10 5010 incompatible systems to the future of medical informatics will be no simple task. A full understanding of the impact to medical office and institutional work-flow will be required throughout the health care delivery system.

Since before 2005 I have attempted through various employers, parters and affiliations to promote the creation of educational materials to support this essential effort, for without education, there can be no transformation. Every person working in the provider's office must understand the software application, document management, scheduling, insurance verification process, clinical encounter data acquisition through interview and electronic telemetry for this transformation to work.

Anyone who has made any attempt to deploy even the most basic Computerized Patient Record (CPR) will understand the enormity of this task. In fact, the hidden costs associated with the implementation of ANY computerized system in medicine are enormous.

A substantive reduction in the true cost of incorporating Health-IT into a clinical practice can be achieved if the MA's, RN's, LNP's, PA's and even MD's have some preparation for the change that is inevitable.

Some may say, "why bother?" - in fact, this is no longer an option - not because of financial penalties which will be imposed beyond 2011, but more importantly because as health care moves into the new word of ICD-10 with CM (clinical Modification) coding and PCS (Procedure Coding Strategies) the current 15,000 permutations which can {barely!} be handled manually or with some minor database assistance will move to 175,000 permutations with a vision of provider decision support and biomedical informatics data acquisition and exchange. This move will benefit mankind, but the price in terms of disruption of medical practice to the small providers will be unbearable for those who do not adopt and perfect the use of Health IT immediately.

This is the impetus behind the ARRA stimulus funding for Regional Health Information Exchange Centers (70 Nationwide), but selecting and implementing even the best of breed EHR/EMR will not solve the enormous challenge of training these allied health paraprofessionals.

It is this vision that forms the foundation of this HUB.