Dr. W. Harlan Charleston had had enough. After a long and exhaustive search to find an electronic health records provider that matched his needs, he had finally resigned himself to the fact that he would simply have to create his own system instead.

“I started writing my own software,” he remembers. “It was while searching for the best way to code portions of the ideal EHR that existed in my mind that I came across ICANotes on the Web, which was all I had envisioned in my mind and more.”

Dr. Charleston reached out, and the decision had a profound impact on his practice.

Taking back his life

For Dr. Charleston, the desire to make a change in his software became one of necessity in order to restore work-life balance and protect his practice. “When EHRs were first mandated by CMS, my productivity plummeted with the EHR system my organization was using at the time,” he says. “Even years into using that system, productivity was awful.”

Completing documentation under the old system forced Dr. Charleston to stay late into the evenings or bring his work home with him to finish the reports. The additional time he was spending on documentation was eating into the time he could spend with family and the focus he could give to patient care. In addition, Dr. Charleston lived in constant fear that he would complete a form incorrectly and be subject to a CMS audit.

The addition of the ICANotes system to his practice has changed all of that.

“I no longer fear CMS audits,” he says. “Not that I was doing anything I shouldn’t have been doing before ICANotes, it’s just that now I am able to document appropriately all the things I was doing before. I no longer have to choose between good patient care and good documentation — I can accomplish both.”

Moving forward

The addition of the EHR mandate initially presented a monumental challenge for Dr. Charleston and his practice, but today he’s more optimistic about the future than ever. “With ICANotes I have not only returned to pre-EHR productivity levels but I have surpassed them and now see more patients each day, complete all required documentation and more effectively capture and bill for services, increasing revenue substantially. All of our staff that has used ICANotes has asked, ‘Why didn’t we get this sooner?’”

To learn more about how ICANotes can support your practice with new efficiencies, visit ICANotes.com.

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