Each year, Health Grades releases a list of the best hospitals in the United States according to their medical outcomes. These hospitals have gone above and beyond to excel and improve their mortality rate, and so they deserve to be commended with the Distinguished Hospital Award for Clinical Excellence. A few of the hospitals on the list include:

• Cedars – Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, California
• Lee Memorial Hospital, Fort Meyers, Florida
• Mount Auburn Hospital, Cambridge, Massachusetts

For a hospital, improving medical outcomes is challenging. Although electronic medical records offers many tools to make it easier to improve outcomes, it is fairly limited as far as the features it provides. Synoptic reporting is the perfect complement to EMR, allowing hospitals to improve medical outcomes in a variety of ways.

Eliminating Transcription

All too often, the level of care a hospital offers to its patients is compromised because of transcription delays. Perhaps your hospital employs a full-time transcription department who is responsible for handling all physician reports. Or, perhaps your hospital outsources your transcription needs, either to a local company, or overseas. Either way, this method has long been proven to be inefficient due to the time it takes to correct errors and receive reports back.

Synoptic reporting enables multi-disciplinary teams to create a report in real time, during the patient encounter. The report is then immediately inserted into the patient record, and is available for access by attending physicians or other staff.

Streamlining the Patient Report

It is very rare for a patient to remain under the care of the same physician for a long period of time. Doctors frequently have to consult with other physicians in different specialties in order to provide their patients with excellent care. However, when reports are not streamlined in such a way that all of the important and required information is readily available, this can cause significant delays for consulting physicians, as well as other staff members. Synoptic reporting streamlines patient reports through templates that are designed according to the hospital’s requirements.

Adding a Search Feature

Physicians frequently study various patient cases to determine past courses of treatment and outcomes in order to improve the level of care they offer to their patients. However, this job is tedious when reports offer such a variety of information that needs to be gone through. It’s often necessary to seek out additional information from other sources in order to get an adequate study of the case of even one patient. Synoptic reporting provides physicians with the ability to search reports for the information they need. They can compare and contrast patient reports easily and quickly, which provides them with the medical outcome data they need to improve their overall level of care over a period of time.

Synoptic reporting is an excellent way to improve patient outcomes for your hospital or medical facility, allowing you to improve the level of care you currently offer to your patients.