Leaping Into Technology – Part Two

Another area to be addressed is maintaining accurate patient records while performing Vision Therapy by means of telehealth. Since many of our offices have closed, it’s conceivable visits will be conducted from our homes, or a place other than our office. This can present challenges in accessing EMR. Here are a few ideas we have explored:

• Remote Access type programs (such as TeleHealth) can be loaded on an office computer or workstation and used for free with nothing more than an email address. It does require someone to be in the office to load the program (takes less than 5 minutes), but once that is done, access is simple. Something we have tried is using one email per computer – i.e Sally’s email addressed is used for Sally’s workstations, Steve’s email is used for Steve’s workstation, etc. This allows each employee to access their own files and programs as if they were sitting in the office.

• Google also offers a FREE remote desktop option through Chrome – named Chrome Remote Desktop. This option requires a specific email login to be used simultaneously on both computers. This is how I am currently accessing EMR for my remote sessions. My email (through Gmail) is logged in on my workstation in the office and I am able to access it from my laptop at home.

• If your office still uses paper records for Vision Therapy, please be aware that the patient privacy aspects of HIPPA are still in effect. This means if you have taken paper charts home OR if you intend to take notes at home, you are still bound by HIPPA’s privacy stipulations. This includes a member of your family accessing those notes, if even by accident. One suggestion would be placing your notes in a program such as Microsoft Word, encrypting them, and then emailing them to your doctor for safekeeping. If you are the doctor, encrypt the files and email them to the general email address of your office. There is some really nice FREE encryption software (called Virtru) out there that meets HIPPA standards. Virtru interfaces nicely with most email servers – Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, etc.

• One last suggestion for record-keeping with Vision Therapy via telehealth is after each session, send an email with a summary of your visit to the patient you just worked with – each time – and BCC the email to your office general email box. This will cover a few different bases. First, it helps to clear up anything which may have been inadvertently ambiguous with your patients. Second, it serves as a backup for recordkeeping and billing should something get confused. When the dust settles, many of us will need to audit ourselves to be sure we’ve covered our bases, billed and recorded everything correctly. Having a digital trail in your email inbox will be incredibly helpful.

Time to watch the daily news conference from the White House.

More to come…