How can an Electronic Health Record help providers?

by Annie P. SEO

What is Electronic Health Records?

Electronic Health Records or you can say EHR, are used to store patients' medical reports digitally.

It contains medical reports details like diagnosis, vitals, immunization dates, charting, past medical reports, laboratory reports, allergies, medication details, radiology images, progress notes, tele-visits, insurance details, claim details, etc.

If you are using EHR, you can easily share your patient's details with other physicians, laboratories, hospitals, Insurance companies, etc. If you want your patient's details from them, you can also import details.

EHR software is a cloud-based system, so you don't have to download or install any software for using EHR.

What are the benefits of using EHR?

Provide up-to-date, accurate, and easily available details
Communicate with patients at any time and anywhere
Import or Export patient's medical reports easily
Provide charting to view details easily
Don't need to store hundreds or thousands of patients paper reports
Help to diagnose patients, reduce medical errors
Provide privacy and security of patient's details
Help to improve efficiency and meet business goals
Provide facility to ePrescribing
Take Progress note of the patient's diagnosis
Analytics and reports of patient's medical records
It helps to improve productivity and work-life balance
Quick access of patient's records from any devices

Which functionalities does EHR provide?

There are many functionalities EHR software provides, it depends on EHR Vendors, or if EHR Software is customized, it depends on physicians' needs. But there are some common functionalities that each EHR has:

Appointment management:

You can manage all appointments of patients like schedule appointments, reschedule appointments, view patient contact details, check patient eligibility etc.

Appointment reminder:

If you want to send reminders to your patients about appointments, you can send notifications or alerts through text messages, phone calls and email.

Billing management:

Manage details of claims, insurance, payments.

Clinical workflow:

With clinical workflow, you can improve the functionality of healthcare systems. Clinical workflow focuses on how processes are performed both administratively and operationally.

Cloud-based systems:

EHR is a cloud-based system, so you don’t have to purchase or download any software.

Document management:

Patient documents can be tracked, managed and archived. It provides archiving functionality for recordings that can be created and edited by different users.

Patient’s Demographics:

You can store or view details of a patient's basic details like vitals to insurance details.

Past medical history:

Store all details of a patient's past medical details like diagnosis, medications, vaccination, vitals, billing details, progress note etc.

Patient portal:

With a patient portal, patient can access their medical information.

What are the standards of EHR?

The EHR standards are created to certify that electronic medical records are useful; Make sure EHRs have the necessary technical skills and safety precautions. Another objective of the standards is to facilitate the interoperability of the following interoperability standards:

Health Level Seven International (HL7) is a set of international criteria for transferring clinical and administrative data.

Enables users to create applications that can run in a healthcare system, including electronic health records

Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR), a suite of web tools included with HL7

SMART Health IT, an open, standards-based technology platform that enables people to create applications that can run in a healthcare system, including HCE(HealthCare Executive).

List of different EHR Vendors: