11/13/06

Dr. Daniel Griffin’s Alpenglow Medical PLLC has won the 2006 Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society Nicholas E. Davies Award for excellence in the use of electronic medical records.

The award is given to health care providers that demonstrate exemplary use of EMR systems, and the primary care clinic, serving the Fort Collins, Colo, community since 1999, demonstrated outstanding EMR performance in four areas of evaluation: management, functionality, technology and value (concrete return on investment).

Dr. Griffin founded his clinic with a target of 100% patient satisfaction. As Dr. Griffin worked to get his practice running the way he envisioned, he realized that complete documentation during the patient visit was critical to clinical success, as well as a solid bottom line since charting after the encounter is uncompensated and takes time away from other patients.

The clinic eventually implemented Praxis EMR by Infor-Med Inc, a system based on concept processing rather than pre-set templates. The concept processor has an artificial intelligence engine that learns from each user to progressively document faster with every encounter.

Testing administered onsite by Colorado’s DOQ-IT Quality Improvement Organization, showed that Alpenglow achieved 91 percent patient “value added time” (the inverse of time wasted). Because of this, patients at Alpenglow see more of their doctor, while spending less time at the clinic.