What is EHR system?
An electronic health record (EHR) is a digital lifetime record of an individual’s health history. If compared with paper documents, electronic ones provide a higher degree of efficiency, effectiveness, and accessibility to health practitioners and patients.
An EHR system aims at storing every detail related to medical and treatment histories, ensuring a comprehensive vision of health. Only authorized medical care providers are allowed to access the records. These may include medical personnel, labs, emergency departments, drugstores, and various others.
Benefits of EHR
Electronic health records have transformed a traditional mode of interaction between medical institutions and patients. Both, medical care providers and their customers may enjoy an extensive range of EHR advantages connected with clinical, managerial, and societal issues:
Better quality of patient care
EHR software solutions allow clinicians to access accurate and current patient records, ensuring timely services to individuals. Thanks to digital medical records, care of the sick has become more synchronized and effective.
Appropriate medical decisions
EHR solutions inform doctors about such important details as previous diagnoses, treatment schemes, prescribed medicines, allergies, vaccination schedules, and test results. Moreover, practitioners across specialties can work together to diagnose a person more accurately.
Automated documentation processing
By implementing electronic health records, clinical facilities obtain efficient capabilities of managing documentation, precise billing, and optimized coding.
Enhanced productivity
A well-tailored EHR software system fosters healthcare practitioners’ productivity as the medical staff does not waste time on finding patients’ information and can avoid doing unnecessary examinations.
Increased security
Patient privacy and data protection are top priorities for any EHR solution. Thus, every actor in the healthcare delivery process is granted secure access to health records.
Types of EHR systems
EHR systems can be classified into three main types depending on how they are configured:
Physician-hosted
A physician-hosted solution implies that all information is hosted on the practitioner’s server. The practitioner has to buy needed hardware and software and handle their persistent maintenance and safety.
Remotely-hosted
With a remotely-hosted EHR, the data storage is provided by third parties bearing responsibility for data protection, servicing, and backup.
Remote systems
This EHR type is subdivided into the following varieties:
Subsidized: A subsidized system presupposes a connection with a particular institution that covers EHR costs. A doctor can build relationships with a hospital that will control the data.
Dedicated: With the dedicated software, digital medical records are accumulated on the vendor’s servers in particular locations.
Cloud: Using an internet-based computing solution, a physician doesn’t have to save health records on their servers as they are placed in the cloud by the vendor.
EHR features and modules
Every EHR system has several building blocks that ensure specific operations:
Front office management
This module deals with scheduling, patients tracking, tasks assigning, generating clinical documentation, and building up a reputation.
Physician support
This structural block provides doctors with such powerful features as an electronic patient chart, data recording modes, reports creation, electronic prescriptions, notifications, state health reporting, and segmentation of data.
Patient portal
This component of an EHR system empowers patients to take an active part in their treatment. Patients can monitor their visit frequency, study symptoms, arrange a follow-up visit, receive appointment reminders, use a digital payment tool, request a prescription refill, etc.
Billing
The main objective of the billing module is to compile insurance claims and direct them to a certain insurance company. The system can deal with unpaid claims, denials, and payment exceptions. This block can analyze financial performance and define the areas that need improvement.