An electronic health record (EHR) is an electronic version of a patient’s medical history maintained by the health care service provider. EHR software helps physicians improve their bottom line. The market is full of solutions that can make things confusing. Here are the essential features you may need in your software.
Easy Patient Scheduling
Patient visit scheduling is one of the most crucial tasks in healthcare practice. The software should allow the office staff to schedule patients easily. It should support patient registration and capture details like a reason for their visit.
After booking an appointment, the software should send automatic appointment reminders via text or email to reduce no-show instances that lower a physician’s productivity.
Intelligent Patient Workflows
To maximize productivity, the physician needs to understand how the patient moves through practice. Select the software that allows tracking the patient workflows in real-time and removes any bottlenecks. It will help if you never have a patient sitting in the waiting room when the examination room is available.
Expedite Patient Encounters
The core objective of using EHR software is to speed up the patient charting process. It helps see more patients during the day and increase revenues over time.
The best software solutions make patient history easily accessible and provide details like medication, existing problems, allergies, immunizations, and other critical medical data to deliver excellent care. The most successful EHR solutions allow the staff to record clinical content through a few mouse-clicks quickly.
MACRA/MIPS Performance Tracking
Maintaining the quality of care is an important goal. It is also vital from the perspective of collecting revenue. The CMMS or Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has established value-based billing and incentives to healthcare providers based on their MACRA/MIPS scores. Hence, the ability to track MACRA/MIPS scores is an important feature. This can help avoid penalties and gain QPP bonuses.
Speech Recognition
A speech-enabled EHR solution allows speaking into an electronic device that translates spoken words into written text. It can reduce data entry and give more time to focus on the core task of caring for the patient.
Advanced Clinical Decision Support
EHRs with advanced clinical decision support will help you in adhering to the best clinical practices. This function provides patient-specific information to improve health and health care.
Medication Decision Support
The medication decision support is a valuable tool to reduce risk and enhance patient care. This function offers evidence-based information related to drug therapy’s effectiveness in treating a particular condition. Hence, it adds a layer of protection against adverse drug reactions.
Manage Consent and Authorizations
The EHR solution should allow your staff to create, verify, and maintain patient treatment decisions. It should store information in the form of authorizations and consents whenever required.
Financial Dashboards
Clinical practices often face tight margins. The EHR solution should have the ability to track overall financial performance. It should allow all users (staff) to analyze the practice’s financial performance through easy to use and understand dashboards. The software should also support the generation of reports on different operational and financial metrics.
This is the list of essential features in EHR software. This guide will help you select an EHR solution that best fits your needs.