Every year, the Association for Healthcare Documentation Integrity (AHDI) and its strategic partner, Clinical Documentation Industry Association (CDIA) (formerly MTIA), bring our members to Capitol Hill to engage in 2 days of advocacy training and high-impact appointments and constituent events with policymakers and legislators. At a time when healthcare reform and "meaningful use" are on the lips of everyone with a connected interest to our healthcare delivery system, it is very important for the healthcare documentation sector to rally around the critical value of patient health information. With our nation's headlong rush toward electronic health record (EHR) adoption, a great many people are crying uncle. Physicians are questioning the loss of patient-centric focus that is now redirected at data entry. Patients are frustrated at the loss of relational connection to a physician whose head is now buried in a laptop for their entire care encounter. And healthcare needs to be worried about the loss of information integrity that will occur if EHR adoption forces physicians to modify their documentation habits - to abandon an information-rich, comprehensive care encounter in favor of a truncated Reader's Digest version that will "fit" into the restricted fields of an EHR.

Our Message to Healthcare and the Hill
Every American citizen has a health story.And we can't afford to lose it. It is more than a database of care statistics. It is the chronicle of every care encounter, treatment decision, clinical conversation and health outcome in a patient's life from birth to death.Preserving that story will be critical to:

• Capturing an information-rich care record for coordinated care and treatment decisions.
• Facilitating truly practical adoption and integration of EHR systems.
• Engaging patients in their own care story in a way that empowers them to make better health decisions and meet care compliance goals.

How AHDI is Advocating for America's Health Story and the MT Role in Capturing It
As outlined in our Comments on Stage 2 Meaningful Use, AHDI fully supports our nation's goals for EHR adoption. Our sector has historic perspective, expertise and innovative solutions that address how those health stories need to be captured and documented. We have the unique ability to facilitate truly practical EHR adoption in a way that preserves America's healthcare story -- so that the focus isn't just on patient health data, but rather on meaningful patient health information. Medical transcriptionists and editors play a critical role in capturing and preserving America's health story. We partner with physicians and other providers to ensure an accurate, secure and meaningful health record.

We advocate for:

• A federal requirement for EHR systems to receive transcribed reports generated from narrative dictation so that physicians can document a patient's full health story and still meet federal requirements for EHR adoption.
• The use of currently existing innovative technologies that will convert narrative text into the kind of codified data required by EHR systems.
• The role of the documentation knowledge worker in partnering with physicians and these emerging technologies to ensure that the focus is not just on how health information is captured but also on how well and how accurately it's being recorded.
• Federal funding for workforce development that will ensure your skills continue to play a relevant and contributory role in the healthcare documentation

What Can You Do to Support this Effort?
More than anything, healthcare needs our sector to deliver on its promise -- that our industry has innovative technologies and documentation professionals ready to contribute skills and solutions that facilitate EHR adoption and improved patient care outcomes. As a member of this sector's workforce, healthcare delivery will look to you to ensure America's healthcare story is captured and managed in an accurate, secure manner that facilitates clinical decision-making and coordinated care efforts. Here are just a few high-impact ways you can contribute to those goals:

1. Get credentialed. Our healthcare delivery system places a high value on the credentials that testify to your skills and training. With lower exam pricing and new exam options, including the ability to take an exam online from your own computer, it's never been easier to achieve this goal. Visit our Why Get Certified? page to get started.
2. Prepare for emerging roles. With emerging technologies like SRT and data-driven EMRs reshaping how care is documented, our sector will be asked to engage in much more than traditional transcription. Editing, data abstracting and data analysis are likely to become some hybrid skills a future documentation professional will be asked to deploy. Consider taking an SRT editing course as a first step toward retooling and upgrading your skill set. Sign up for AHDI's SRT Editing Course.
3. Brush up on regulatory compliance. Due to HITECH changes in regulatory compliance for health record privacy and security, more scrutiny than ever before is being placed on protected health information (PHI) -- who has access to it and how it's being handled. If you aren't operating in compliance with those regulations, start your advocacy efforts with self-education. AHDI has a powerful resource to assist you -- Ethical Best Practices: Resource Guide for Healthcare Documentation Specialists.
4. Be an advocate. Consider an active role in advocacy by joining AHDI's legislative leaders program or advocate in your own work environment by sharing this poster and our advocacy materials with your employer, colleagues, providers, clients and others who need to understand the importance of an accurate health story. Learn more about AHDI's advocacy efforts by downloading the AHDI and CDIA Advocacy Agenda and visiting our Become an Advocate page.

It would be impossible to over-emphasize the position our sector is in right now with regard to narrative capture and EHR development. If we are unsuccessful in getting the attention of healthcare about the importance of a comprehensive health story, we may miss the opportunity to secure a place for narrative capture (i.e., dictation) in the evolution of the EHR. And where dictation goes, there too goes transcription as an applied skill set. Certainly much has been said here and elsewhere about the emerging and evolving roles where MTs can be redeployed in healthcare, and it would be self-serving to argue on behalf of narrative capture solely because it would preserve transcription jobs, but our associations feel strongly that coordinated patient care and meaningful health information is at risk if the option of narrative is not preserved for the physician. That's what we'll be telling our legislators on May 4, 2011. Won't you join us?

Lea M. Sims is the interim managing director for AHDI, www.ahdionline.org.