AOTA Partners on Electronic Documentation System

By the end of this year, the American Occupational Therapy Association plans to test its own electronic patient record and documentation system for the occupational therapy profession. In a licensing agreement with Cedaron Medical Inc., they are creating documentation templates for evaluations, assessments, interventions and outcomes.


 

The system is designed for all types of clinical settings, from large hospitals to small nursing homes and private practices, says Chuck Willmarth, director of reimbursement and regulatory policy for AOTA. And it will allow OTs to meet the documentation needs established by facilities, payers, government agencies and accreditation bodies.

“Cedaron has an existing product, so the basic structure is there,” Willmarth says. “We’re filling in the details specific to occupational therapy practice.”

Using the Cedaron platform, OTs will be able to customize the software to their individual workflow, document all components of patient care and track outcomes. The system also will allow for scheduling patients and communicating directly with billing systems. Clinical managers will be able to produce management reports on patient care operations.

Users participating in AOTA’s National Outcomes Database for Occupational Therapy will be able to access national and facility-based outcomes measures for benchmarking patient progress. The system will be specifically designed to capture outcomes data using the Boston University Activity Measure for Post Acute Care and other measures. The AM-PAC, an outcome instrument provided by CREcare LLC, assesses a client’s functional status across three domains: basic mobility, daily activities and applied cognitive.

The Cedaron system is capable of integrating with other medical record systems, such as those already in place in large hospitals, but there are financial costs associated with such a melding, Willmarth says.

Willmarth says AOTA will retain ownership of the templates to the Cedaron system, which may open the door for the association to offer the templates to other platform vendors.

(Source: AOTA)