SRS

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Carolina Orthopaedics’ team of 8 providers offers continuous care in all aspects of musculoskeletal medicine to the Gastonia, North Carolina, community.

Why SRS?

Universal Value
We really hit the jackpot with the adoption of SRS! Our goals were to make life easier for the physicians, increase employee efficiency, and enhance patient satisfaction. We achieved all three.

Our physicians no longer experience the frustration of thumbing through thick sections of a patient’s chart looking for a particular piece of information critical to decision-making. They now have immediate access to complete charts which are organized and customized according to their personal preferences. They can always find exactly what they need quickly and easily. Message pooling has been very valuable for the physicians. They are confident that when they digitally document an order, it will be taken care of. They no longer worry that the request might get lost in the daily crush of paperwork.

SRS definitely helps us retain staff. Our administrative staff is working smarter, not harder. They know they are doing a better job, without working as hard as their peers at other practices. They report enjoying the structure and organization that SRS has brought to their days.

Patients value our responsiveness. We now routinely fill requests in less than 4 hours, and often in less than one. Our standard used to be a 24–48 hour turn-around for non-urgent calls. They appreciate that we process their prescriptions in less time than it takes them to get to the pharmacy. Satisfied patients are key to our growth.

Across-the-Board Efficiency
With SRS, we are providing better care with a smaller support staff. We currently have 4.25 employees per provider, which is considerably below the average for a busy orthopaedic practice of our size. Shortly after implementation, we reduced our support staff by 4 FTEs through attrition. In the first year, we eliminated 342 hours of costly nurse overtime. Physicians use the messaging function to communicate with the nurses, who now handle calls as they come in throughout the day. They no longer accumulate piles of messages for the nurses to address after hours. The result is better care, no overtime, and staff who get to spend more time with their families.

SRS enabled our triage nurses to streamline the process of handling calls. What used to take them 16 steps now takes only 4. The same number of nurses handle a greater number of patients, and they provide better service and do it in less time.

Implementation Without Practice Interruption
Implementation was seamless, and was executed without additional overhead costs. We saw the same number of patients on “go-live” Monday as we did on the previous Friday. In fact, the timing was fortuitous. During one month this year, we were able to handle the influx of 400 new patients who sought our care when a local practice disbanded. Because of SRS, we pulled it off without a hitch.

We knew the practice needed to go digital, and I was convinced that SRS was an outstanding product. We evaluated traditional EMRs and found that SRS offered every EMR feature that orthopaedists actually use, and at about one-third of the cost. The decision to purchase took some convincing, since we had just added our practice management system, but it was the right move at the right time. I staked my career on the adoption of SRS, and now no one at Carolina Orthopaedics can imagine living without it.

A Perfect Trifecta
We provide better patient care, we get to go home earlier, and we experience less stress!

With SRS, we can focus all of our efforts on patient care. We’re not distracted looking for charts. We can often respond to a patient’s question while they’re on the phone, or call back with an answer within minutes. Patients tell us that they have never received such good service from any medical office before.

Our nurses used to work until 7:30 or 8:00 PM in order to answer the messages that had accumulated for the physicians throughout the day. Now they can go home to their families by 5:30. By the SRS messaging function, we have cut down the process for handling patient calls from 16 steps to 4 steps. SRS allows our physicians to act on their messages between patients, as they are forwarded to them. The nurses follow-up in real time, and don’t face a pile of work on their desk at the end of the day. The Rx module is also a tremendous time saver. We create the prescription, send it via message to the physician for approval, and with one click it is at the pharmacy.

It’s amazing how easy it was for a whole group of people to learn how to use SRS. In one day, we were fully functional! We are enjoying wonderful benefits personally and professionally, and experiencing considerably less stress.

All you have to do is walk in the office and see how wonderfully the system has worked for us.

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