Office Managers

Office managers and staff play a key role in implementing Medical Relevance in the single practice office.

Although the physician is responsible to sign up for Medical Relevance, and use the medical history during a patient exam, a key action must be taken to instruct each patient who is identified as a medical history candidate how to do a history questionnaire and make sure each history gets into the proper medical chart. This requires a minimum level of interaction with each patient to make sure he or she has computer access and is pointed to the correct website. These interactions are best done by the office staff during appropriate times.

A Suggested Approach is:

1. Advise and encourage each candidate patient to go to www.visitnote.com and complete an anonymous medical history questionnaire. After the physician signs up and chooses an access code, an office staff member simply gives that access code to any patient who needs to take a medical history. Typically, this can be done when the patient makes an appointment over the phone or in the office. First, the office staff member will make sure the patient has a computer with internet access, then provide the access code along with the appointment time and date, and ask the patient to just log onto www.visitnote.com anytime up to 24 hours before the appointment and take the medical history questionnaire. Make sure the patient knows the site is anonymous, which will minimize the patient's concern. The visitnote website is very simple and easy to use, and the patient should be able to complete the history without any intervention.

2. Check for medical histories on a daily basis. When signing up, the physician can choose to receive medical histories by fax or email. If by email, only one email address can be used. Once patients are provided opportunities to do histories, an office staff member will need to check for returned histories. If they are returned by fax, they will simply come in on the fax machine; however, if they are returned to an email address, that email will need to be checked for incoming histories. The returned history will be attached to an email as a PDF file, which is simply printed and will contain the same information as a fax. In either case (fax or email) the medical history will have a cover page that provides all the information necessary to identify the patient.

3. Identify the patient with each returned history and file it into the patient's record. At www.visitnote.com, the patient takes an anonymous history for his or her protection, that is, no name is required at any point in the questionnaire. The patient is identified after the history is received by the office in the following way: Once a medical history is returned to the office and received by an office staff person (item 2 above), the cover page must be checked for the appointment time and date. The patient is identified by correlating the appointment time and date on the cover page with the time and date from the office medical appointment book. Once the patient is identified, their chart can be pulled, and the patient's identity can then be confirmed by comparing the date of birth and gender on the cover page with information from the pulled chart. Once the person is identified and confirmed, the report should be filed into the patients file for use prior to the examination when the medical history can be scanned by the physician.

The process is simple, with very little change in workflow. However, please feel free to call us at 1-877-MEDREL1 with any questions.

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