Electronic health records (EHRs) offer a bounty of advantages for healthcare organizations. Here’s how to select the right EHR technology for your practice, so you can ensure you’re reaping the benefits.
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What Is EHR Technology?
Imagine your medical history as a giant filing cabinet — but instead of a billion folders and papers flying everywhere, it’s all digital and meticulously organized. That’s essentially what EHR technology is.
It’s a system that stores all important medical information in one place, from allergies and medications to diagnoses and treatment plans. While modern EHRs are pretty comprehensive, at its most basic, it’s an electronic version of a patient’s paper chart.
How EHR Is Used in Healthcare
EHRs are like the central nervous system of modern healthcare. Doctors can access their patients’ complete medical picture in seconds, allowing them to make quicker and more informed decisions about care. No more scrambling to remember past treatments or risking dangerous medication interactions.
Plus, EHRs streamline communication between specialists and providers, ensuring everyone is on the same page for a more coordinated healthcare experience.
Difference Between EHR and EMR
People often use the terms EMR and EHR interchangeably, but they’re not exactly the same.
Electronic medical records (EMRs) belong to a single doctor’s office. A personal EMR stores a patient’s medical history within that practice.
EHRs, on the other hand, are more comprehensive. They can include information from all of a patient’s care providers, creating a more complete picture of their health.
As technology improves, EHRs are becoming more common, facilitating patient information exchange between care teams and healthcare facilities.
5 Key Components of EHR
EHRs come with many functionalities, supporting both the clinical and administrative sides of a medical practice. But these five core EHR capabilities define the technology — and offer incredible value to your practice.
- Clinical Data Repository: This is the digital vault that stores all of your patients’ vital health information. It includes demographics, medical history, allergies, medications, immunizations, lab results, imaging reports and physician notes.
- Decision Support System: Think of this as a handy assistant for doctors. It analyzes medical data and provides real-time clinical recommendations, drug interaction alerts and preventative care reminders.
- Order Entry System: This allows healthcare providers to electronically order tests, medications and procedures directly within the EHR. It eliminates potential errors from handwritten orders and streamlines the treatment process.
- Patient Portal: This secure online platform gives patients access to their own health information. They can view test results, medication lists and upcoming appointments, and even communicate with their doctor directly.
- Reporting System: This helps healthcare providers and organizations track trends, analyze data and generate reports. It can be used for quality improvement initiatives, public health reporting and research purposes.
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Pros and Cons of EHR
EHRs can be assets to healthcare facilities, but they aren’t flawless. Here are some of the main pros and cons.
Pros
Better Decision-Making
EHRs provide physicians with instant access to a patient’s comprehensive medical history, including medications and past diagnoses, to help them make informed decisions and personalize treatment plans. This can lead to improved patient outcomes and fewer complications.
Fewer Errors
If you work in healthcare, you know that errors in the field aren’t just inconvenient — they’re sometimes life-threatening.
EHRs both streamline error-prone manual processes, like sending electronic prescriptions instead of handwritten ones, and catch potential hazards before they happen, like identifying and warning doctors about medication interactions. Features like clinical decision support tools can provide real-time guidance to clinicians, reducing the potential for missed or incorrect diagnoses.
Better Care Coordination and Communication
Secure messaging features facilitate better communication between all healthcare providers involved in a patient’s care. This fosters collaboration, ensures care continuity and eliminates potential delays or misunderstandings.
Accessibility
EHR systems enable authorized providers to access patient records remotely, making doctors well-armed to respond to patient needs with the right info in hand.
Cons
Usability and User Interface Issues
One of the biggest challenges medical staff experience with EHR is adapting to new system interfaces and workflows, especially if workers are hit with poorly designed UIs or navigation issues, potentially hurting productivity and office efficiency.
Data Security
EHR systems are vulnerable to data breaches, ransomware attacks and unauthorized access, necessitating robust security measures to protect patient confidentiality and ePHI (electronic Protected Health Information).
Balancing access to patient information for treatment purposes while safeguarding against unauthorized use or disclosure poses ongoing privacy challenges.
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Key Features
In addition to the key components above, here are some of the core features of an EHR system:
Appointment Scheduling: Patients can book appointments online, even outside of office hours. This saves time on phone calls and lets patients schedule appointments when it’s convenient for them.
Medical Billing: The system automatically tracks charges for things like diagnoses, procedures and medications.
Reporting: You can easily generate reports on patient information, appointment trends and your practice’s finances.
Customizable Dashboards: View important information about your patients, like upcoming appointments and medications, all in one place.
Current and Upcoming Trends
Big changes are coming to EHR systems in 2024! Here’s how current EHR trends might affect the future of healthcare.
A) Interoperability
We talked to Dr. Akhil Malhotra, a healthcare professional who specializes in health care informatics, EHR product development and clinical decision support systems, about the importance of interoperability in selecting and implementing an EHR system:
Interoperability is an important aspect in selection of an EHR system. It ensures that EHRs can communicate and share data with other systems, such as labs, pharmacies and other health care providers.
It allows for a complete patient picture, even if the patient receives care from multiple sources. It facilitates better care coordination, reduces duplicate tests and allows patients access their own data through patient portals. At the macro level, interoperability helps create HIE networks.”
B) AI and Machine Learning
AI bolsters intelligent clinical decision support in several ways:
- AI can analyze patient data to flag upcoming health problems, allowing for early detection and better outcomes.
- AI can look at a patient’s medical history and suggest the best treatment options based on current conditions.
- AI can help predict if a patient might have complications, so doctors can take steps to prevent them.
C) Mobile Health
With mHealth integration, EHR systems are working with wearable devices like smartwatches and fitness trackers. These come with some unique benefits:
- Doctors can see their patients’ heart rate, blood sugar and activity levels, even if they’re not in the office. This gives them a better picture of each patient’s overall health.
- Real-time data help providers see if there might be a health issue early on, so they can intervene quickly.
- For chronic illness sufferers, mobile tools can help track health and symptoms and instantly share data with your doctor, making it easier to manage these conditions.
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Examples of EHR in Healthcare
Here are some real-world applications of EHR and similar technology across different healthcare settings:
- Cleveland Clinic’s new computer system helped them catch medication errors way before they happened. This reduced medication errors by 80% and improved patient safety.
- Doctors at the Mayo Clinic can now watch over patients with heart problems from home. Patients with chronic conditions have their vital signs monitored remotely, allowing for early detection and preventing escalation.
- MD Anderson Cancer Center uses EHR data and genetic testing for personalized cancer treatment, potentially leading to better outcomes
- Staff at Mercy Clinic use their computer system to share information easily between different specialists, so diabetic patients get the best care possible.
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) use current and new patient files to see how many people have chronic diseases like asthma. This helps them decide how to best use their resources to keep people healthy.
These are just a few examples, and as EHR technology continues to evolve, we can expect even more innovative applications to emerge across the healthcare industry.
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FAQs
A Certified EHR technology (CEHRT) meets the following specific requirements:
- It meets CMS and ONC regulations, crucial for incentive program providers or those facing payment adjustments.
- It offers essential features like clinical documentation, medication management and reporting.
- It prioritizes encryption and HIPAA compliance to protect patient information.
- It enables seamless data sharing among healthcare IT systems for better care coordination.
EHRs can save your practice money in the long run, even though they cost money upfront. Here’s how:
- Reduced Paperwork: No more filing cabinets full of charts! EHRs store everything electronically, so you save on printing, storage and the hassle of searching for old paper records.
- Improved Billing Efficiency: Submitting claims electronically means you get paid quicker, and there’s less paperwork to handle.
- Minimized Medication Errors: EHRs can warn doctors about medication conflicts, which can prevent expensive problems for patients.
There are three main ways to get an EHR system, each with different costs:
- Software-as-a-Service (SaaS): For a monthly fee, the vendor company takes care of everything online. It’s easy to set up, but you can’t customize it as much as other options.
- Hosted: In a hosted model, the company stores the system on their servers and you access it online. There’s usually a one-time fee and then a monthly fee to keep it running.
- On-Premise: This is like buying your own software. You install it on your own computers and have complete control over it — which costs the most upfront (and possibly overall, given maintenance and IT costs), but provides the most control and security.
Here are some questions to ask potential vendors’ references to get the inside scoop:
- How satisfied are you with the system overall?
- Is it easy for everyone on staff to learn and use the system, even if they’re not tech-savvy?
- Does it integrate well with the other solutions you already use in your office?
- Does the EHR system provide the functionalities you need to manage your daily operations well (e.g., appointment scheduling, ePrescribing, lab integration)?
- How has the EHR system impacted your practice workflow?
Switching to an EHR system can be tricky. Here are some of the challenges doctors face:
- Cost: EHR systems can be expensive, with upfront fees and monthly costs. This can be especially tough for smaller practices.
- Workflow Disruption: Switching from paper charts to a computer system can slow things down at first, while records get converted and staff learns the new system.
- Data Migration: Getting all the information from old paper charts or older computer systems into the new EHR can be a lot of work.
- Technical Limitations: Some offices might not have the internet speed or the correct bandwidth to run an EHR system smoothly.
- User Resistance: Doctors and staff used to paper charts might not be excited about learning a new system. Training and support are important to help everyone get comfortable.
- Interoperability: If the software doesn’t seamlessly exchange data with other healthcare systems (like labs and referral networks), it can make it hard to get complete patient profiles and hamper care coordination.
- Security and Privacy: EHR systems store private patient information, so they need robust — and sometimes pretty pricey — security measures to prevent hacks.
- Standardization: There are various EHR systems on the market, and it can be hard to compare them because they don’t all work the same way.
The HITECH Act encourages EHR adoption by rewarding health care providers for meaningful use. This approach drives widespread implementation to receive financial rewards and avoid potential penalties.
Yes, HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) regulates electronic health records (EHRs). It does so through the Privacy Rule and the Security Rule, which set national standards for protecting individuals’ medical records and personal health information (PHI).
The Privacy Rule establishes guidelines for how PHI can be used and disclosed, while the Security Rule mandates protection to ensure the confidentiality and integrity of electronic PHI (ePHI). Complying with HIPAA is essential for safeguarding patient privacy and maintaining the security of electronic health records.
While EHR adoption has become increasingly widespread, not all hospitals have fully implemented EHR systems. Adoption rates vary based on factors such as hospital size, budget constraints, technological infrastructure and regulatory requirements.
Many hospitals are transitioning to EHR systems to improve patient care, streamline operations and comply with regulatory standards like HIPAA. However, some smaller or rural hospitals may still rely on paper-based records or have limited electronic health record capabilities.
Yes, doctors and other healthcare professionals widely use Electronic Health Records (EHR) in their practices. EHR systems have become integral tools for managing patient information, documenting clinical encounters and facilitating communication among healthcare teams.
EHR adoption allows doctors to access patient records electronically, review medical history, track medications, order tests and coordinate care more effectively. Despite challenges such as usability issues and workflow integration, EHRs have become essential for modern healthcare delivery, supporting improved patient care, operational efficiency and regulatory compliance.
No, electronic health records (EHR) and Epic are not the same thing. EHR is a type of software, and Epic is a widely used EHR vendor. Here’s a more detailed breakdown:
- Electronic Health Records (EHR): EHR refers to digital versions of patient medical records that are stored and managed electronically. EHR systems include a range of functionalities such as patient demographics, medical history, medications, allergies, laboratory test results and treatment plans.
- Epic: Epic is a specific vendor that provides EHR software solutions. It’s one of the largest electronic health record companies in the United States, offering comprehensive EHR systems tailored for healthcare organizations such as hospitals, clinics and physician practices.
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Next Steps
Selecting the right EHR technology is a crucial decision that can significantly impact your practice’s workflow, efficiency and quality of patient care. By following a structured approach, you can ensure a smooth implementation and maximize the benefits of your EHR system.
Need help finding the right EHR? Our free, interactive comparison report can help you compare top products and learn about their functional requirements in detail. Good luck!
Have more questions about EHR implementation? If you’re currently using EHR technology, what challenges, if any, are you facing in EHR adoption? Let us know in the comments!
SME Contributor
Akhil Malhotra is a healthcare professional with over a decade of experience in the private and public healthcare sector. A Masters in Public Health, he specializes in Healthcare Informatics, EHR product development, and Clinical Decision Support Systems.