The Chicago-based American Medical Association (AMA) released three online educational tutorials to help physician practices better implement health information technology (health IT).

“Physician practices may need to redesign and reorganize their office routines so that they can successfully and efficiently adopt health IT,” AMA president Peter W. Carmel, M.Dm said in a statement. “The AMA created these tutorials to help physicians understand how to best implement new technologies, such as ePrescribing, into their practices.”

This series of short video tutorials feature downloadable tools and best practices about health IT for physician practices. The tutorials will provide physicians with guidance on how they might better use health IT in their practices.

The three tutorials cover ePrescribing, pre-visit planning and point-of-care documentation. The first tutorial explains the value of ePrescribing and the quality, safety, and efficiency of ePrescribing compared to handwritten prescriptions. The tutorial aims to help physicians identify opportunities for medication management improvement while enhancing physician and patient convenience.

The pre-visit planning tutorial will look to help physician practices to establish a pre-visit planning structure that provides full patient information to the physician before the patient arrives. This can create new efficiencies that will allow more time for patient-physician interaction and shorter patient wait times. The point-of-care documentation tutorial addresses decisions regarding the type of hardware used during an office visit. The tutorial also aims to help physician practices understand the type and format of information that should be entered during a visit.