Reduce administrative burden: Chart review

Streamline workflows and reduce administrative burden with pre-visit planning and practice models.

Transformations to reduce chart review burden

Learn about organizational changes a practice can make to modify its workflow and operations. Transformations to improve chart burden range from pre-visit planning to adopting an entirely new practice model.

Transformation 1: Team-based pre-visit planning

Save time and increase satisfaction by letting your team help you prepare for each appointment ahead of time.

Conduct pre-visit planning

  • Look back

    Have your MA do a “look back” at the chart a week or so before the next visit to ensure that the plan from the previous visit has been executed and results are in the chart.

  • Place orders to get results before the visit

    Have your MA ready orders, such as labs based on the patient’s conditions or medications. The results would then be available for review at the patient’s visit.

  • Use pre-visit calls for complex patients

    Have your MA call your complex patients to reconcile medications, anticipate problems, and screen for other factors (e.g., fall risks or depression) and then reconfirm at the face-to-face visit.

  • Conduct regular huddles

    A morning mini-huddle with your MA lets you provide the best possible care to patients.

Dedicate a team member to complex patients

This person can identify high-risk patients and monitor their progress toward quality metrics, including:

  • Check that the quality metric data is accurately assigned.

  • Update any missing metrics that have been met.

  • Contact patients who need to be seen to achieve specific quality metrics.

  • Order protocol-based labs or studies that patients need to satisfy outcome metrics.

  • Review patient satisfaction surveys and provide feedback to team.

Transformation 2: Team-based care

The “team” in team-based care varies based on the organization, its patient population’s risk profile and its resources.

In general, it is considered an advanced care team with in-room support. At its simplest, it includes a clinician and two or three medical assistants or nurses who are sometimes designated as care team coordinators (CTCs). These CTCs require greater skills as more care responsibilities are shared.

Teams can be extended further with the addition of advanced practice health care professionals under the physician’s direction, with each having a designated MA or nurses in the team care coordinator role. Beyond that, health professionals, such as pharmacists, social workers or behaviorists might be shared across teams.

The goal is to allow the team members to practice at the top of their licenses. The physician can then focus more on the patient, listen deeply, make accurate diagnoses, create better treatment plans, react to the patient’s preferences and engage with the extended team of health professionals to ensure comprehensive care is delivered.

Evidence shows that team-based care can:

  • Increase patient access to care

  • Increase productivity by allowing practices to see more patients and provide comprehensive care

  • Increase efficiency

  • Improve quality

  • Increase revenue

  • Provide tangible cost savings

Dive Deeper

FPM journal cover referencing pre-visit planning.

FPM: Putting pre-visit planning into practice

When you see your next patient, is all the necessary information organized? Or do you start each appointment on details you could cover pre-visit?
Front cover of FPM journal.

FPM: Taking team-based care to the next level

The need to delegate tasks to other members of the health care team has never been more urgent. Learn how to move toward advanced team-based care.

Related community