Did you know how much time healthcare providers spend on EHRs?
Well, some of the major studies suggest that clinicians spend around 40% of their time on redundant EHR tasks, shifting their focus on filling up the administrative stuff from patient care. To give you a detailed overview about their time spent on EHRs, around 33% of their time is for reviewing charts and 24% on documentation alone.
Though these are some of the essential and crucial aspects in the care journey, the impact it has on healthcare providers’ productivity can impact the entire practice. EHRs have been implemented to enhance the workflow and care quality, but on the contrary it is making it difficult for healthcare professionals in carrying out their day-to-day clinical tasks.
One of the major reasons for this has been poor implementation and data migration problems. This is where custom electronic health records emerge as a solution that can streamline the healthcare workflow and eliminate all the hindrances that can disrupt care delivery.
But how can a custom EHR be a solution that can be a replacement for an off-the-shelf or generic EHR solution?
Well, let’s explore that in this blog and also see how custom EHR software can enhance clinical and administrative workflows for a clinic.
Eliminate Data Entry Fatigue with Automated Workflows
As mentioned earlier, the poor implementation of EHR software has increased the burden of manual data entry in traditional EHRs. In simple terms, the manual entry of data increased fatigue and caused irritation for healthcare providers while using traditional EHR software during care delivery.
On the other hand, when a custom EHR software is used most of the manual tasks are automated. For instance, repetitive tasks like appointment scheduling, referrals and report generation are taken care of by the custom EHR software system and all these tasks are automated, enhancing the workflow and improving the efficiency of healthcare providers.
Since most tasks are automated the time spent on EHRs by healthcare professionals will be reduced and the focus will be again on providing better care. This way healthcare providers will not only eliminate the need for manual entry of data but also improve patient care with a holistic and personalized approach.
Improve Care Coordination with a Unified Platform
Another problem that is experienced by patients is that traditional EHR software systems maintain proper care coordination between all the members of the care team, including the patient. Since traditional EHR software creates isolated data across different systems, fragmented patient data is not communicated to stakeholders at the right time. This leads to delays in care and other aspects of care. Along with that, the chances of care duplication and other problems also increase.
This problem is overcome by custom EHR software by integration with various functionalities. Integration functionalities like appointment scheduling, lab results and electronic prescriptions into a single platform which is in the form of electronic health records of the patient, it becomes convenient for everyone to stay updated on the care journey of the patient.
Custom EHR software helps in bringing everyone on the same page and working together towards the same goal with proper coordination.
Enhance Patient Engagement with Self-Service Tools
Patient engagement has been a crucial aspect in healthcare delivery. The psychological effect it has on patient health has always been valued in care since ages. This practice has been followed down in traditional practices and also is valued in virtual care practices.
That is why a specific demand for patient engagement has been seen as essential in modern-day healthcare software. Here, traditional EHRs fail because they offer very limited patient engagement features as they majorly focus on electronically storing patient health information.
Custom healthcare software here comes with integrated patient portals that not only enable patients to access their health records but also give them access to communication channels and other self-serving tools. For instance, with secure communication channels, both patients and providers can easily connect with each other. Along with that, with appointment scheduling, they can easily schedule their appointments and request refills with medication refills.
This plays an important role in patient satisfaction and allows them to adhere to their treatment plans every stakeholder in the care team can easily track the adherence rate and other aspects of care delivery.
Gain Valuable Insights with Customizable Reporting
Reporting features of a software plays a crucial role in gaining valuable insights about a patient’s health and also improving the practice. Traditional EHRs have very limited or almost no reporting features, gaining valuable insights about the practice and comprehensive patient health becomes difficult.
With custom EHRs, you can generate customized reports that are tailored to your practice’s specific needs, like calculating patient efficiency levels and calculating every person’s adherence rate with their care plans, etc.
The access to this data completely changes the nature of your practice to data-driven practices. This helps the administrative part in managing the practice better and control patient health outcomes effectively by imbibing timely intervention, etc.
Ensure Scalability & Future-Proof Your Practice
Last but not least, scalability and future-proofing the practice is something that every traditional EHR lacks. As your practice grows, the data in your software systems also grows which requires scaling to accommodate the increasing number of patients in the practice.
A crucial aspect of this is also abiding by the regulatory requirements for virtual care delivery such as HIPAA, GDPR, HITECH Act, etc. Due to its ever-evolving nature, it becomes increasingly difficult to customize traditional EHRs. However, with custom EHRs, you can easily make changes to your software to comply with regulatory requirements.
Conclusion
From making the practice data-driven to increasing patient engagement and future-proofing your practice, custom EHRs improve the efficiency of your practice, and automation streamlines the workflow, making it an ideal solution for your practice.
This helps completely transform your practice into a digital practice, which not only adds value to your practice but also offers great initiatives for potential revenue generation.
So, what are you waiting for? Improve the efficiency of your practice with custom EHR today. Click here to get started.
