Emergency medicine must address multiple compliance requirements including the newly enacted Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Manual documentation lacks the benefit of the automated oversight that Amelior ED® provides to ensure that documentation consistently supports compliance requirements.

Joint Commission hospital surveys can identify issues within emergency departments across many of the JCAHO standards. Amelior ED® has a direct impact on the following potential survey areas:

• Patient privacy
• Medication control
• Verbal orders
• Management of information for emergency care
• Pain assessment and management
• Patient safety
• Documentation of LWBS or AMA
• Documentation of informed consent

In addition, the implementation of an emergency department information system can help address the JCAHO national patient safety goals in the emergency department:

• Improvement in the effectiveness of communication between caregivers
• Improvement in the safety of using high-alert medications

Amelior ED® provides a uniform documentation standard important for substantiation of medical actions covered by EMTALA legislation. These include:

• Triage records
• Documentation of medical screening examinations, presence of an emergency medical condition, stabilizing treatment, medical decision making, course of treatment in the emergency department and discharge instructions.
• Documentation of transfers and associated medical risks and benefits
• On-call list management
• Access to historical medical records upon request

Amelior ED® is HIPAA-ready as part of a hospital’s overall HIPAA compliance program. While compliance is ultimately determined by the conduct of a hospital’s staff and the enforcement of internal protocols, Amelior ED® creates an operating environment and a documentation process that is much stronger than manual patient tracking and documentation methods.

• Reduced risk of inadvertent disclosure of protected health information (PHI) through the elimination of the public patient tracking grease-board, the virtual elimination of paper and a reduction in verbal orders between care-givers.
• Enhanced medical record privacy based on access controls to PHI that are established on a role and user basis.
• Automated audit log of all access to a medical record documenting the name, date and time. Any additions to a medical record that has already been closed must also include a rationale.
• Medical records are secured with password protection and user authentication.
• Physical safeguards protect access to the Amelior ED® database and servers.

As a business associate, Patient Care Technology Systems has already implemented internal employee protocols to extend the privacy and security of protected health information to our own operations.

Commenting on the National Report Card on the State of Emergency Medicine