Joy Hester, our lead nurse was kind enough to write a guest blog post about her experiences with EMR. She has been with the practice for many years (I won’t say HOW many) and has been invaluable in the development of Ankhos.
Hello. This is my first attempt at blogging. So I am a little nervous but here I go!
I am a nurse. My knowledge base is in people, not in macros, pigeon holes or textboxes. Over the years I have learned a lot, self taught, what I like to call a “computer geek wanta be.” I know enough to get by. Let’s just say I know just enough to be dangerous.
Having said that, when the very busy Oncology Practice I work for purchased an EMR I was asked to help as a super user and was eager to get involved. Why not? I love this stuff!
I worked on developing the chemo regimens and single agent favorite list of drugs. I also developed documentation tools call Questionnaires for nursing documentation. I thought Questionnaires was an odd name for a documentation tool but, after a while it made sense. The Question was “Why does this have to be so hard?”
I could go on and on about how difficult the EMR was to use but I do not want to relive that. We finally scrapped the drug ordering and administration portion of the software. We now only use the scheduling and note portions of the EMR. We looked at other systems and did not see anything we wanted to pursue.
Then along came Ankhos.
Ankhos is so easy to use. I even have some privileges to add and modify drugs and procedures. These are called Orderables.
In the old system this was the hardest part. We are nurses. We are surrounded by patients who need our attention. We need an easy to use adaptable system where doctors can order and nurses can document treatments accurately.
We now have it.
We are in the enviable position of having an on staff software developer, Nick Orlowski, available to build the software to meet our needs. All we have to do is ask.
Working with Nick, I began to understand that the software should work for me, not me working on the software. I started to ask what Ankhos can do for me. These things are coming and I am excited to see how they develop.
We are accurately documenting on our patients. All the documentation requirements are being met. One of the best parts for the nurses is to be able to pull the treatment to an order sheet when the patient goes to an outside facility for their chemo. Ankhos tracks the location of the patient’s treatment and I am then able to verify the treatment is given after notification from the hospital the treatment is complete.
I review all the previous days encounter forms and having the drugs documented in Ankhos has saved me so much time when there is a question about a charge on a form. All I have to do is pull it up. I would have to physically find the chart to verify the treatment before Ankhos. It is wonderful to have it right there.
We have just begun. I am excited to see what is coming.
-Joy
