How Your EHR Should Integrate with Practice Workflow

Would you allow someone with no previous dental experience to perform a root canal on your son or daughter? Of course not.

Likewise, having an understanding of your practice’s workflows and processes is essential when selecting an EHR vendor. You’ll see it’s easier to recognize issues in advance and use procedural knowledge to choose the EHR features and functions that will streamline your workflow.

Practice workflows tend to focus on paper charts and the individuals each chart is passed to as it moves through the office. On any given visit, a chart can be handed off from a physician’s assistant to a nurse to a doctor to a biller, and so on.

With an EHR, though, the physical transfer of paper is eliminated and converted to a digital login process, which enhances workflow processes and PHI security. In turn, workflow processes that paper practices normally carry out mentally should be fully fleshed out prior to EHR implementation, which will carry out some of these practices in a more structured manner.

The implementation process is beneficial to your patients as well, seeing as paper charts don’t empower patients the way EHRs do. Nowadays, patients expect to be more involved in their personal care and will want to contribute data directly to the process.

This multi-level collaboration between physicians, staff, and patients will help eliminate paper charts while bolstering health data through improved accessibility, accuracy, and completeness.

[do action=”titled-box” title=”Steps to Creating a Process Improvement Outline ” colortitle=”ligth_blue” titleboxcontent=”1. Recognize where data comes from and how it is used. 2. Outline current clinical processes related to workflow. 3. Identify processes and the individuals performing them. 4. Collect charts, forms, and reports that will be automated through the EHR. 5. Review your outline to find improvable areas. 6. After improving upon your current outline, compile a new set of clinical processes. 7. Test new workflows and train all staff.

By outlining your practice’s processes and workflows, you’ll know what your physicians and staff members need in an EHR. Use this information to determine the specific functional requirements of your new system and decide which questions to ask your EHR support team.

If you’d like to learn how our EHR solution integrates with your practice’s workflow, please feel free to contact us at 1-877-342-7517 or hello@carecloud.com.

A version of this article was originally published on the sister site, Power Your Practice. Click here to read the original story by our seasoned Health IT Editor, Ahmed Mori.

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