Welp MagazineIf you operate a healthcare business, you are sure to benefit from using electronic health records, which are more commonly known as EHRs.
In short, EHRs are digital versions of patient health records that can be shared with different healthcare providers and professionals.
That means authorized users can access a wide variety of data, including patients’ medical histories, demographics, immunization statuses, radiology images, medications, allergies, test results, and billing information, in real-time.
Such information can be immediately accessed anytime and anywhere.
Therefore, it should already start to be clear just how advantageous using EHRs can be for any kind of healthcare organization.
But let us take a look at four specific benefits of an EHR for your business.
Choosing an EHR That Is Perfect for Your Business
Before we look at some of the most important benefits of electronic health records, it is worth pointing out that there are various EHR software options available, just as there are a number of software options available for project management and other purposes.
So, once you decide to adopt an EHR system, make sure that you spend time outlining your business’s specific needs to find the right solution.
This guide on how to choose the right EHR software has many great suggestions, including:
- Evaluating the needs of your program and staff.
- Thinking about the kind of support you want from your vendor.
- Understanding the implementation process for a specific EHR.
1. Using EHRs Enhances Your Workflows and Efficiency
Now, let us look at four of the top reasons why your healthcare business needs to use EHRs.
Firstly, when the professionals in your organization are able to access and share accurate patient data in real-time, workflows can become enhanced and your business can run much more efficiently.
Whether it is accessing lab test results or billing information, by having instantaneous access to reliable data, your operations are sure to run much more smoothly.
Using an EHR system also means you can avoid errors from happening.
Ultimately, that not only benefits your healthcare business. It also benefits the patients because their care will become improved.
2. Using EHRs Helps Your Business to Stay HIPAA-compliant and Protect Patient Data
Healthcare businesses need to stay HIPAA-compliant to ensure all patients’ records are protected and kept secure.
If a data breach should happen, it could potentially ruin your business’s reputation. It could also be very financially damaging.
Thankfully, when you use EHR software, you can ensure that all patients’ health records and information are protected and your business remains HIPAA-compliant.
3. Using EHRs Enable Your Business to Increase its Revenue
EHRs not only contain patients’ medical information. They also contain billing information and have many useful billing and payment tools.
In turn, that means your healthcare business can better ensure that payments are accurate and made on time.
That alone can help your business to increase its revenue. But when you use EHR software, you can also scale up to include larger patient bases.
Of course, when you scale correctly, you can broaden your streams of revenue and generate higher profits.
4. Using EHRs Can Help Your Business to Save Money
Following on from the last point, using EHRs can also save your healthcare business money in various ways.
The enhanced efficiency that EHRs bring alone can help you to save money because members of staff can perform tasks more quickly and therefore your business can increase its productivity.
But your organization can make all kinds of small savings when it adopts an EHR approach, and small savings soon mount up to considerable savings.
For example, you could make substantial savings by simply limiting or eliminating the need for transcriptions when you use EHRs.
You may also be interested in how Microsoft Azure can save your business money.
