We received a call from one of our lab customers requesting a results only interface for one of their referring physicians. The referring physician has sent only a small volume of cases to the lab, and the cost from the EMR vendor alone would make the cost of an interface unjustifiable. The referring physician group was under the impression that an interface was required by the new healthcare mandates. The buzz around federal reimbursement dollars for medical practices under the ARRA (The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009) has created some confusion. Keep in mind, that a full results only EMR interface is not the only option to satisfy the electronic results requirement. Parsing fact from fiction is not easily done, and physicians are not always getting honest answers from vendors. That’s not to say that there isn’t good information available and being communicated, but many times in trying to close a sale, vendors may be muddying the waters. On more than one occasion, it has been left to us to educate not only our lab partners, but their referring physician groups on what an interface does, is, and what the costs are. If you are a referring physician, an interface (results only or results and orders interface) from the lab may be what is required, often times all that is needed is to receive results and satisfy the electronic results requirement. We provide EMR interfaces for our customers and are certainly not opposed to them. We just want to make that our customers know all the facts and we deliver exactly what they need. In the case described above Pathagility’s ReportPath product fit the bill and was just what the doctor ordered.
Ask questions from your vendor, make sure you are not just getting upsold, and that you are getting exactly what you want and need for your practice. Avoid being shoe-horned into what works for someone else. At Pathagility we focus on offering products like ReportPath that work alongside and seamlessly with other systems, and strive to deliver and communicate with our partners before, during, and throughout our relationship.