EHR and Practice Management Integration: What You Need to Know

by Tech Geekk writer

In the modern healthcare ecosystem, practice management software has been rendered vital for the successful and productive operations of hospitals, medical facilities, etc. on account of their ability to facilitate seamless daily operations. This is done via automated scheduling and billing, etc. While this is all great, hospitals still feel the need for more help with operations. One solution that offers the scope to lend such assistance is an Electronic Health Record (EHR) system.

Why? Well because it stands to enable hospitals to deliver better quality of care, enhanced access to healthcare services, and cut down operational costs.

The integration of EHR system is extremely relevant in today’s modern world. And, with all that the practice management and treatment relies on the patient information. The integration is a big factor while determining the best of practice management essentials as a key component of ensuring how the personal health information (PHI) is kept safe.

And to help you understand what electronic medical records (EMR) is all about – it becomes vital for any practice. I believe it would help the medical facility to acquire new patients, retain existing patients, enhance the patient experience, and eventually drastically improve the patient management and processing. To help you better understand the importance of EHR integration, here are some of its main benefits.

To help you better understand the importance of EHR integration, here are some of its main benefits.

Better patient care: Together, practice management and EHR systems help staff deal with their workflows via streamlining, automation, etc. So, with processes such as appointment scheduling, sending alerts for appointments, etc. taken care of, the staff is able to fully focus their attention on more important aspects of their jobs.
Improved access: This duo is also conducive to the efforts to ensure better access to requisite data. So, when healthcare professionals and staff are able to access medical records, billing data, etc. from their mobile devices, etc., the hospital is able to achieve significantly improved levels of productivity across the board.

Here are some of the best practices to ensure you glean the best possible value from such an integration.

Standardise data format: Data across the medical ecosystem is typically gathered in a variety of distinctive formats, which, if not properly dealt with, can give rise to interoperability issues and other such problems. Thankfully, an effective solution is to establish a standard for data set among all your vendors, including that for the EHR system.
Clean the data: It is not news that clean data is imperative to ensure the success of your operations. Hence, the EHR system must be able to determine issues such as old data, incomplete data, duplicate data, inadequately formatted files, etc. Once the issues are found, the data cleaning process will be able to tend to these issues and ensure continuity of the integration process with the EHR system.
Establish a data acquisition pattern: The current lot of EHRs in the market do not have a standard for schemas and documentation, which means it varies between different vendors, resulting in interpretation issues for the EHR system’s data integration tools. Hence, it is recommended that you establish one data acquisition pattern to ease the data extraction and integration processes.

To help you get started on your search for such software, here are some of the top options in the market:

athenahealth
NextGen Healthcare
TheraNest

Now, before we wrap this up, let us also give you an overview of the EHR integration challenges you are likely to encounter.

Employee resistance: Not everyone on the hospital’s staff will have similar levels of skill with technology. Second, even those familiar with advanced technologies will have the skills to effectively operate the solution. Such factors will result in resistance against the use of such software.
Cost: As beneficial EHR integration is, the fact remains that it can be an expensive undertaking.

Clearly, your healthcare practice management system development project can deliver significantly better results when fortified with a robust EHR system. So, go ahead and kick start the integration process ASAP.