More on CIS Enhanced View

Phew... I just came home from a day-long synagogue board retreat. In an effort to prevent my wife from saying yes to another community responsibility, I stepped up last summer when things were looking pretty bright for the coming year. Well, what a difference an economic crash makes. Suddenly, I find myself in the mix of change management in all corners of my life. (I don't think I need to give the gory details of "managing" two teenagers.)

While I can't say that change is always easy, there's no doubt that it can be good. And the IS and informatics teams are doing all we can to make the change to CIS Enhanced View better than good. With time and attention, I think you will find yourself with an EMR that truly is enhanced. The training sessions that the team is currently holding for staff superusers are going extremely well. Each and every clinical site will have at least one person who will have an in-depth introduction and understanding of the Enhanced View and will be the first line of response when we rollout on March 24. And as you've heard here and elsewhere, physician superuser classes will be held in early March. Get to a session if you can.

Yesterday, I posted a brief intro to the Message Center. In the coming days, I'll get a little deeper into the tools. Messages, reminders and consults will foster communication not previously practical via CIS. Take advantage of the new Pools feature and foster new ways to manage messages and results by all members of the clinical team.

As for documentation, we continue to create PowerNote templates to meet the needs of primary and specialty care clinicians. Two new features that we will be introducing are Free Text and Auto Text. Free Text allows for text entry directly into the "final version" view of a document. Simply click into the note and type. No more need to scroll back and forth or stretch open the text box. Auto Text is similar to using macros, using abbreviations to populate the note with text. For example, "The patient is brought in by ambulance" could be entered into the note by typing BIBA or by selecting from a list as is done with macros. More to come in future posts.