EMR – Will It Help Only Physicians?

An electronic medical record (EMR) is a computerized medical record created in a physician’s office or hospital. It is an electronic version of paper based medical records that have been serving customers till now. However, with the advancement of information technology, the industries across different verticals are making the best use of automation to improve the quality, productivity and ROI of their business. Healthcare industry being not an exception to the rule, has started realizing the importance of automation and particularly EMR.

Though EMR is a new buzz word in the healthcare industry, a question often disturbs patients – is EMR only for doctors? As far as the adoption of EMR in a physician’s clinic or hospital is concerned patients are often disturbed as regards the benefits of implementing the system. A large no. of patients have a feeling that the system would only benefit doctors, would interfere with security issues, would result into appointment and treatment delays.

According to health IT experts, it would be absolutely wrong to say that EMR is meant only for doctors. In fact, EMR has to benefit both doctors as well as patients. The implementation of the system has to benefit doctors as well as hospitals with improved work flow, increased productivity and ROI. As far as patients are concerned the whole exercise of implementing the system is based on the ultimate goal of providing better medical care to the patients. The focus of the software product is on making life easier for patients with improved work flow and quality of care.

If we carefully analyze meaningful use criteria, which being introduced by US government for availing various incentives for implementing EMR, the ultimate goal of achieving meaningful is to bring about significant improvement in the quality of patient care. So it is the patients who are ultimately going to be benefited from EMR implementation, hence it wouldn’t be right to say that “EMR is only for doctors”?

Top 10 Must Have Features in an EMR for Physicians

Just as every medical specialty has its unique requirements; all physicians have their own preferences for what is most important to them in selecting their EMR Software. Here is a universal list of the top 10 must-have features in an Electronic Medical Records Software (EMR Software). The list includes the important technology and day to day usability features. The list also takes into account the features that physicians deem important in the context of being eligible to receive a number of incentive payments available from the multitude of agencies (federal and state) for implementing EMR / EHR software, that fulfill the requirement in demonstrating meaningful use of EMR / EHR software.

1) A fully Integrated EMR Software System

2) Integration of EMR Software with ePrescription

3) An EMR system that supports PQRI Automation

4) EMR with tracking capability

5) Secure access to EMR records

6) Integrated patient portal

7) EMR with simple / easy-to-use templates

8) Document and image management

9) Voice and handwriting recognition capabilities

10) Meets all regulatory and compliance requirements

Your EMR Software must satisfy all mandatory Federal and State regulatory and compliance reporting, general reporting requirements, and appropriate coding documentation.  The other upside of requiring that these features be built-into your Electronic Medical Records Software, is that this is extremely important to qualifying each provider in your practice to receive all the incentives available for EMR from Federal and State agencies.

If all you did was to require these top 10 must-have EMR Software features from a vendor, you can rest assured that you will also get the other essential, most up-to-date, and easy to roll-out and use functions, found in the leading EMRs like Claimat EMR today!

Choosing a Right EMR and Migration of Data

EMR (or electronic medical record) is the electronic version of manual patient medical records. The world is going digital to reap the benefits of digital technology and medical industry is not an exception to the rule. EMR is the new buzz word in the medical industry for the benefits it can deliver to doctors, hospitals as well as patients. However, the success to a great extent depends on selecting a right “EMR system” for the practice.

Selecting a right EMR system for the practice or hospital is not an easy task. There are numerous vendors providing a wide range of systems, each with a different set of functionalities. In this situation the task of choosing a most suitable system becomes very difficult. In case wrong or unsuitable electronic medical records software is chosen for the practice, instead of streamlining the process it might make the task more difficult.

There are certain points that need to be taken into consideration when choosing an EMR for the practice. At first, taking note of the existing system of records management is very important. Then defining current and future practice needs is of utmost importance. Before choosing a system one should also compare a no. of available options in the market and also ensure that the vendor provides with training and long term support.

Once a right or suitable EMR is selected for the practice the next important task being data migration. The basic setup tasks need to be considered before migration can be started. The migration must be done very carefully so that the product works fine. However, certain bugs can not be eliminated at this stage. Truly speaking, it takes about 6-12 months (and sometimes longer) for a practice to become comfortable with an EMR system and get the bugs worked out.