Technology has infiltrated nearly every aspect of the modern human experience, and healthcare is no different. Successfully implementing health information technology (HIT) into a medical practice can bring improvements in the quality of patient care and in practice operations.
An EHR is a computerized system of accessing the history of a patient’s care. The content of an EHR is analogous to a patient’s paper record, but the electronic format creates usable data in medical outcome studies, improves the efficiency of care, and makes for more efficient communication among providers.
An EHR conforms to nationally recognized interoperability standards and can be created, managed, and consulted by authorized clinicians and staff across more than one health organization.
Improvements in quality of care, patient satisfaction, and operations are often experienced during the first year of EHR use. The degree to which providers experience these benefits is in direct proportion to how extensively they use their EHR for as many of their daily tasks as possible; even greater benefits are realized when the system is fully integrated into a network of providers through Rhode Island’s HIE, currentcare.
Sections:
Increased Efficiencies
Initially, using an EHR will disrupt your routine; after the first year, many physicians experience a significantly improved workflow and productivity. An EHR can help eliminate double- and triple-handling of patient forms, repetitive dictation, manual note-taking, and can streamline patient-related administrative tasks.
Workflow Benefits of an EHR
| Instead of . . . | Use HIT to . . . |
|---|---|
| Relying on staff members to confirm appointments | Automate the reminders |
| Manually faxing prescriptions to pharmacies | Prescribe electronically |
| Calling the carriers to verify insurance coverage | Verify online |
| Relying on the skill of the practice’s coder to assign codes to services | Create template-based documentation to display structured data so that the coding process is accurate and verifiable |
| Depending on third-party payers to provide baseline data and progress reports on pay-for-performance goals | Create your own reports to monitor your practice’s progress and reconcile any major differences with payers early on |
| Negotiating payer contracts blindly | Develop value-based negotiating strategies by integrating financial and clinical data |
| Needing to be at the office to review patient charts | Access patient records remotely and in real time |
(Table adapted from Texas Medical Association’s Electronic Medical Record Implementation Guide: The link to a better future, 2nd edition, 2009. The Physicians Foundation; www.physiciansfoundation.org.)
Medical practices that use HIT potentially can gain the same type of cost savings that information technology creates in other types of businesses.
Improved Quality of Care
Studies show the more advanced the use of electronic documentation, the greater the opportunity to improve quality of patient care and safety. Accessing data from paper medical records is time-consuming, because it involves reviewing information manually. An EHR provides efficient electronic access to clinical data to systematically improve quality of care with
- Improved access to patient records
- Enhanced patient education materials
- Quicker turnaround times for results of lab tests and imaging studies
- Improved diagnostic processes
- Streamlined health maintenance and chronic disease management
- Protocol-based treatment
- Reduced number of medical errors
HIT can noticeably benefit the following:
- Patient safety – increased use of information technology is a key to reducing risk to patients. For example, e-prescribing, in conjunction with an EHR, improves patient safety by eliminating the need to interpret handwriting and by checking prescriptions against the patient’s medication list for any potentially harmful interactions or allergies before sending the prescription to a pharmacy.
The incorporation of evidence-based protocols, decision support, and e-prescribing into the EHR gives the healthcare provider diagnostic and treatment-relevant information during the patient encounter. - Quality improvement – an EHR enables physicians to build evidence-based protocols in medical records. Additionally, providers can produce and use data to view patient care and practice performance in the context of the aggregate population they treat. Because of an EHR, you can answer questions that can lead to definable improvements in patients’ health, such as the following:
- What percentage of my patients with diabetes actually received their periodic eye and foot evaluations?
- What percentage of the children in my practice received their immunizations on the correct schedule?