10 Ways an EHR will make your practice more efficient

Your day is probably filled with an abundance of inefficiencies. Patients will show up late (or not at all) to their appointments. Intake forms will be incomplete or illegible, slowing down their review. Let’s not forget about having to spend the first half of an appointment asking your patient to fill in the blanks on their partially complete patient history.

We often try and improve these inefficiencies with temporary fixes. For example, your office manager may try to call all your patients to remind them of their appointment the next day. However, Band-Aids can only go so far — if you could address an inefficiency costing your practice time and money directly, wouldn’t you want to do so as quickly as possible?

An EHR can significantly improve practice efficiency, but the ways it does so can be surprisingly unique for each practice. We asked our customers what improved the most when they adopted an EHR. Here are a few of their answers:

1. Improved accuracy
“On paper [charts], we never had an accurate medication list; now it is accurate 90% of the time.”

2. Increased patient engagement
“Being able to create a care plan that patients can directly interface [with] on the patient health record side makes our job much easier as well.”

3. Structured data
“We now have more structured information in terms of medications and allergies and are able to transmit that to other providers.”

4. Better scheduling
“We are able to manage and schedule patients across two office locations, while before we had the EHR, we only had internet at one location, meaning we were unable to schedule patients from one office if the other office was closed.”

5. Easier viewing of patient history
“With the old paper charts, it was difficult to pull up ongoing medical problems, chronic medical problems, vaccination schedules, etc. With [the EHR], there is a separate section that can be pulled up instantly to track this.

6. Enriched patient history
“Complete patient history and charts were not readily available before EHR. Now they are at my fingertips.”

7. Improved management of appointments
“Scheduling and managing patient appointments are a lot smoother. Also the communication between the patient and the provider is also easier. The scheduling system allows patients to make their appointments without calling or making a visit to the office.”

8. Increased legibility of notes
“Way better to read typed notes than hand written.”

9. Quicker access
“[I am] able to access records quicker and see what we are missing or need.”

10. More accessible
“Easy access via internet everywhere.”