Published Date
Author Leona Rajaee
The move from paper records to an electronic health record (EHR) solution offers many benefits for you and your patients. Improving the quality of care, including reduced documentation error and duplication, is the ultimate goal, of course. Reducing stress and burnout are also important goals. However, there are many benefits of EHR systems for your practice. Let’s take a look at 11 of the top benefits of EHRs.
11 benefits of EHR systems
The benefits of EHRs are outlined by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC). In particular, the ability to exchange information electronically can help you provide higher quality and safer care for your patients. EHRs also offer tangible enhancements for your organization. EHR benefits include:
1. Improved patient care
One of the main benefits of EHR solutions is that they elevate patient care on multiple fronts.
EHRs enhance disease management by providing comprehensive patient histories, enabling more accurate diagnoses, and personalizing treatment plans. They improve care quality by enhancing safety (reducing errors and drug interactions), streamlining care coordination, and tailoring care to individual needs.
EHRs also promote patient education through easy access to health information, which helps patients to make informed decisions about their care. Moreover, these systems improve communication among healthcare providers, ensuring timely information sharing. All of these improvements in different patient care areas lead to a marked improvement in the ultimate care provided.
2. Enhanced Efficiency
A significant boost in practice efficiency is another one of the benefits of EHR solutions. To start, integrated scheduling systems link appointments directly to progress notes, automating coding and the management of claims.
This not only reduces administrative burden but also enhances medical practice management, ensuring that appointments are seamlessly tied to patient records, which minimizes errors and delays.
Many practices report that EHRs streamline collaboration between other clinicians, hospitals, and labs. They also enable automated formulary checks by health plans and the convenient ordering and receipt of lab tests and diagnostic images.
Furthermore, EHRs provide links to public health systems, such as registries and communicable disease databases, ensuring a rapid response to public health concerns.
These systems are accessible from anywhere and greatly reduce paperwork and administrative tasks – creating a more efficient, cost-effective, and collaborative healthcare environment that benefits both patients and providers.
By spending less time on paperwork and making it easier and faster to collaborate on patient health, EHRs can greatly reduce the costs spent on administrative tasks.
3. Better patient charting
EHR systems significantly enhance patient charting for healthcare providers. They offer structured templates, which allow for simple and consistent documentation. Automated data entry provided by an EHR system also significantly reduces the risk of errors.
These systems enable real-time updates, ensuring that patient charts are always current. They also give you seamless access to past records, promoting better continuity of care.
4. Reduced errors
One of the great benefits of EHR systems is the reduction of medical errors. With built-in safety checks, EHR solutions enhance accuracy and can alert healthcare providers to potential issues like drug interactions and allergies.
Staff members can easily misinterpret handwritten notes, which can lead to unfortunate errors in care. An EHR can help to do away with that issue at your practice.
5. Secure data
EHR systems enhance data security by implementing robust encryption methods, which safeguard patient information from unauthorized access and reduce the risk of breaches.
Regular backups and disaster recovery protocols also ensure data integrity – even in unforeseen events. Another one of the benefits of EHRs is that they offer audit trails to monitor access and changes, promoting accountability across your staff.
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6. Accurate billing
EHRs improve billing accuracy by automating the billing process. EHRs also link clinical documentation with billing codes, reducing coding errors and ensuring that services are accurately represented.
You can use your EHR to streamline claim submission and management, reducing the chances of missed or incorrect billing information and helping to avoid denials.
Additionally, EHRs track and timestamp all patient encounters and services, ensuring that billable items are properly recorded. This automated approach minimizes manual data entry errors and enhances the accuracy and efficiency of the medical billing process.
This means there will be fewer coding errors and claims denials and fewer hours spent with administrative tasks, which can create huge cost savings for your independent practice.
7. Patient engagement features
Patient engagement features in EHR systems empower patients in their healthcare. These features include secure patient portals, messaging with providers, online appointment scheduling, and updating personal health information.
Some EHRs also provide educational resources, integrate telehealth, enable secure document sharing, send medication reminders, offer interactive care plans, and gather patient feedback through surveys.
These tools enhance patient involvement, improve communication, and support patient-centered care, ultimately leading to better health outcomes and increased satisfaction among patients.
8. Compliance with important regulations
Next on our list of benefits of EHR systems is ensuring compliance with crucial healthcare regulations like HIPAA. EHR systems do this by implementing strict access controls and encryption to protect patient data, ensuring confidentiality and integrity.
EHRs also support standardized coding and reporting, helping facilities meet regulatory reporting requirements.
9. Improved patient health
One of the benefits of EHRs that you might not consider is a more big-picture outcome: improved patient health across larger populations.
EHR systems can enable data analysis to identify at-risk populations, promoting targeted interventions. EHRs also aid in tracking and managing chronic conditions, emphasizing the importance of regular check-ups and preventive measures.
By providing a comprehensive view of a patient's health history, they empower healthcare providers to offer personalized advice and interventions, including diet and exercise recommendations.
This proactive approach fosters healthier behaviors and reduces behavioral risks, contributing to improved population health and decreased healthcare costs through disease prevention and early intervention.
Overall, EHRs contribute to better patient outcomes through improved data access, care coordination, decision support, and patient engagement.
How does EHR reduce costs through improved patient health?
These improvements can lead to a decrease in healthcare costs by preventing medical errors, reducing redundant tests and procedures, and allowing physicians to allocate their time more efficiently.
10. Better clinical decision-making
EHR systems enhance clinical decision-making by consolidating data from medical records, lab results, prescriptions, and imaging, providing a comprehensive patient profile. This holistic view enables healthcare providers to make more informed decisions, ensuring accurate diagnoses and treatment plans. For a deeper dive into the impact of EHR systems on clinical decision-making, you can explore insights from the American Medical Association.
Interconnected EHRs also facilitate real-time data sharing between care providers, fostering collaboration and a deeper understanding of the patient's history. The result is more coordinated, evidence-based care that ultimately improves patient outcomes.
11. Lower healthcare costs
Finally, EHR systems play a vital role in reducing healthcare costs. How does EHR reduce costs? It does this by promoting preventive medicine and improving healthcare service coordination.
The integration of preventative care reminders and data analysis in EHRs helps healthcare providers identify at-risk patients and offer timely interventions, potentially avoiding costly treatments down the line.
Improved coordination of healthcare services through EHRs also ensures that patients receive appropriate care at the right time, minimizing redundant tests and treatments.
With better communication among healthcare providers, EHRs prevent unnecessary duplication of services, which can lead to substantial cost savings for both practices and patients.
Cost savings for practices that take advantage of EHRs for their practice include:
- Reduced transcription costs
- Reduced chart pull, storage, and re-filing costs
- Improved documentation and automated coding capabilities
- Enhanced ability to meet important regulation requirements such as Physician Quality Reporting Initiative (PQRI) through alerts that notify physicians to complete key regulatory data elements
- Reduction of time and resources needed for manual charge entry – resulting in more accurate billing and reduction in lost charges
- Reduction in charge lag days and vendor/insurance denials associated with late filing
- Charge review edits alerting physicians if a test can be performed only at a certain frequency
- Alerts that prompt providers to obtain Advance Beneficiary Notice, minimizing claim denials and lost charges related to Medicare procedures performed without Advance Beneficiary Notice
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