Dr. Dennis Fong

Outside Dr. Fong’s front office,

A vibrant pink sign reads, “We Keep Our Patients Healthier! Our Patients go into Hospital 25% Less Than the Average in This Area.”

In a time where providers are under increasing scrutiny to reduce their average cost-per-patient, independent practices are more mindful than ever about the burden of delivering quality care at a fraction of the cost.

Dr. Fong, who runs an independent Family Medicine practice in Walnut Creek, CA, started using Elation 6 years ago. With the help of some well-placed requests for data under the Freedom of Information Act, he managed to obtain the total cost of care for his patients. After some meticulous Excel wizardry, Dr. Fong then calculated the Hierarchical Condition Category (HCC) scores for each patient and his or her associated costs and compared per patient costs to his county average.

Here’s what he found:

Dr. Fong’s average patient costs have been consistently below the average in Contra Costa County, where he has his practice. Even more interesting, this gap jumped in 2011 and has continued to grow in recent years with reductions in cost per patient as high as 51%.

So what happened in 2011?

Dr. Fong believes that a single feature Elation released in his EHR at this time had a tremendous impact on his ability to provide high-quality care at lower cost – the Dynamic Problem List.

As Dr. Fong calls it, Elation’s “wonder button” lets providers import problems and associated labs from a patient’s record into their current visit note with just one click. The smart-mapping algorithm then immediately organizes the relevant lab results with their correlated clinical problem to help drive a more comprehensive clinical insight and holistic patient overview. This enables Dr. Fong to take the action steps needed to improve patient care “real time “and creates a longitudinal patient record for future visits.

“It enables me to provide high quality, personalized, timely care to such patients because it allows me to see and correlate the data efficiently, to manage the meds, the treatments, and the tests, and to document efficiently, thoroughly, and accurately. I have not seen any EHR remotely close,” explains Dr. Fong.

Prepare for value-based care

As the healthcare landscape shifts towards a fee-for-value payment model, tools that help physicians deliver better care more efficiently by linking lab results with the clinical problem list- all within the EHR, improve quality and cost of care metrics.  Elation’s Clinical First EHR is specifically focused on helping you succeed in delivering value: to provide phenomenal, comprehensive care at a lower cost-per-patient.

Just like Dr. Fong.