PointClickCare Customer of the Month: Chance Backert

We’re excited to announce PointClickCare’s November Customer of the Month – Chance Backert!

Chance is a PointClickCare Champion and has been working in diverse clinical settings for 25 years. After moving into the Health IT sector 5 years ago, Chance was brought on board at Bayview Healthcare in St. Augustine, Florida to transition the organization to an EMR platform. Working in Project Management and Clinical Informatics, Chance has spent the last 4 years successfully working towards that goal, recently closing out the last paper chart on the SNF side.

We sat down with Chance to learn more about her experience and the impact being paperless has had at Bayview Healthcare, especially during evacuation situations.  

Tell us about Bayview Healthcare.

Bayview Healthcare is part of the St. Johns County Welfare Federation. Founded in 1920, Bayview has a long-standing history of providing long term care of the sick and frail, elderly and the indigent residents of the City of St. Augustine and the county of St. Johns. 

What’s the best part about your job?

The most rewarding part of my job is when I can bring an electronic solution to the table that makes an end user’s job easier. That moment when you see a face light up during training after they realize that a process will now take half the time that it used to. There is a direct correlation to the amount of time a nurse spends with a patient and how positive the patient’s outcomes are at the end of their stay. I believe that if every decision is made with that goal in mind, then we will all be successful in a way that we can be proud of.

What was is like to go close out that final paper chart?

The Director of Medical Records and I were so excited and wanted to shout from the rooftops that we closed charts once and for all! However, the end users where busy taking care of patients, so it was business as usual on their end. I realized that in my role, I’m there to support the end user so they can care for patients effectively. We are supposed to be “the man behind the curtain” making magic happen – and that’s exactly what we did.

What was the biggest challenge before going paperless?

It was very difficult for the interdisciplinary team to work on the same resident as a lot of time was lost waiting for your “turn” to get the chart. It was also difficult to supervise the work because they had to physically go find a chart to do quality checks. With PointClickCare, anyone on the management team can log in from anywhere to look at the work being done. It’s been amazing to watch the entire team have access to everything they need to safely and effectively care for a patient.

One example that comes to mind is how our providers can log into the Practitioner Engagement app from home on a Saturday night to review a patient’s medications before prescribing something new to manage an acute finding. The amount of risk that this mitigates is hard to even quantify.

You’ve experienced several emergency evacuations over the last few years. How has electronic health records helped you manage these situations and continue to provide seamless healthcare to your residents?

Bayview Healthcare is situated in a flood zone on the east coast waterway of Florida, so Hurricanes are a very real risk that we must manage. We’ve had to evacuate twice and each time we simply activated the “Emergency Access” button in PointClickCare. The button gives all end users remote access so we can pack up our laptops and take PointClickCare with us. Once at the host facility, we had access to our medical records and could pass meds safely and timely with zero gaps in care. We also printed MARS/TARS before the storm for emergency redundancy. I cannot imagine having had to do this without being on an electronic platform that allowed us to be mobile with our patient’s data. Evacuations are an extremely stressful event for all parties involved and being paperless took one huge piece of that stress off of the table.

What’s one tip or piece of advice you’d give to an organization thinking about implementing EMR?

It can feel very overwhelming but if it’s done in a manageable way then it can be accomplished. It takes proper planning and having someone designated to manage the projects, but it was so worth it! My best suggestion is to take it one PointClickCare module at a time. I truly feel that having an EMR benefits the patients in every way. At the end of the day, you know that you have provided your patients with the best chance of having their best life.

Connect with Bayview Healthcare on Twitter, Facebook, or check out their website to learn more about the organization!