Quickly and easily evaluate an EHR, any Electronic Health Record, by asking how it supports you with the following functionality. Quickly get focused on what matters and use the expertise of others to assess the system.
Interoperability:
Does it share well with others? In today’s practice environment, no man (or woman) is an island. They can’t be for the sake of their own practice, and for the care of their patients. Data, which is information for billing and clinical care must be able to flow back and forth between an increasing number of parties.
Can the EHR share with such diverse systems as Health Information Exchanges (HIE), pharmacies, payers, radiology/imaging services, referring physician, cancer and immunization registries, as well as other disease state registries, hospital networks, as well as the electronic devices increasingly being added to an office?
Today’s EHR must be interoperable, able to share two ways with others. The world of healthcare treatment and reimbursement is increasingly interdependent, and if you are not part of this sharing world with data, you will not only lose out on patient information that could impact the care you render, but also be excluded from even participating in some of the new, and increasingly complex reimbursed offerings.
Ease of use:
Technology can be hard. How easy is it to actually use? Does the Electronic Health Record allow for customization of your template for documenting a patient visit, or do you have to twist yourself into a pretzel to document? How flexible is it to follow your usual patient flow, enabling you to truly personalize your operations?
Optimization of your workflow:
While mirroring your patient flow may be necessary for comfort in transitioning to a system, dashboards that let you monitor your operation and reporting capabilities are necessary to allow you improve your practice. Doing is the status quo, improving is the way to make your practice a success. If an EHR does not contribute to practice improvement across its entire operation, from productivity to revenue to improving the quality of the services you provide, the EHR is not contributing to making yours a better practice.
Patient engagement:
How does the Electronic Health Record enable you to engage patients? Yes, a patient portal, but what does it allow you to do with your patients that increases satisfaction, service quality and reduce your operating costs?
Needed is the ability of your patients to securely request appointments and refills online, receive test results as they become available, utilize educational material and update their health status, history, demographics, and insurance information while subscribing to valuable electronic tools and services.
KLAS Rating:
KLAS Research is an accurate, honest and impartial research on the software and services used by providers and payers worldwide.
Their extensive research and evaluation process provides an objective review of EHRs and related software.
You need to ask; “How does KLAS rank you?” to every EHR you might be considering. The extensiveness of KLAS ranking which takes into consideration actual user experiences is in-depth due diligence.
Choose the EHR that is right for you, but make sure it is highly ranked by KLAS at a minimum.
