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5 Components of a Modern EHR That Benefit Behavioral Health Clinics
The behavioral health care industry is notoriously behind when it comes to adopting new technologies, which often leads to outdated, clunky software that doesn’t work together. Case in point: the electronic health record (EHR). Despite some flaws, legacy players in the space continue to dominate.
Behavioral healthcare organizations often feel they lack the time and resources to adopt new technologies, but this shouldn’t be the case. Clinicians spend an average of 35% of their time documenting patient data, or an average of 16 minutes and 14 seconds for every patient encounter. Administrative burnout is a real issue that impacts the well-being of clinical workers and patients.
Modern EHRs designed for the modern clinic are lessening administrative burden, improving the patient experience and ultimately creating better outcomes. With artificial intelligence (AI), the possibilities for EHRs are endless, from automating patient scheduling to predicting the best treatment plans based on population data. Modern EHRs are a world away from your legacy EHR, but that doesn’t mean every new player on the block is created equally. If you are in the market for a new EHR platform, here are 5 of the most important things to look for.
Transparent Pricing Structure
EHR providers have a bad reputation for nickel-and-diming their customers for every change, customization, or new feature. Many clinics are hesitant to consider changing their EHR for this reason alone, as they feel the costs will continue to add up to create the solution they need for their clinic. Many providers tease new and exciting feature sets, only to ask for an additional fee to utilize them. A quality EHR should be upfront about its billing structure and state exactly what your costs will be going forward.
Solution Built for Behavioral Health Care Clinics
Many EHRs are built for primary practices, with feature sets created for behavioral health added in as an afterthought. Organizations in the market for a new EHR should ensure that any EHR they are considering was built with the unique needs of behavioral healthcare providers in mind. This should include functionality that supports electronic visit verification (EVV) and tools designed to support federally qualified health centers (FQHC).
Mobile Capabilities
While 97% of Americans own a cellphone of some kind, the behavioral healthcare industry has been slow to adopt mobile-friendly technologies and use mobile apps to access EHR data. The pandemic, telehealth, and digital transformation efforts have helped to drastically increase adoption and change perceptions. However, few EHRs are designed to be mobile friendly, and even fewer have mobile app capabilities.
The future of healthcare is mobile, and we will continue to see mobile adoption rise and more clinicians and patients requesting mobile-friendly solutions. Therefore, if you are changing EHRs, it is extremely important to find a solution that is easily accessible on mobile devices. Make sure the vendor has a mobile platform in place.
Flexibility
Every provider has unique needs, and it is expected that every EHR will offer some form of flexibility to design a solution around the needs of your practice. But the level of flexibility and customization available can vary greatly between vendors. How often will the EHR provider push updates? What feature set is available? How long will it take to create custom forms? These are all questions that should be asked to gauge how easily a provider can customize a solution unique to their practice.
Artificial Intelligence
All behavioral health practices are collecting an enormous amount of data that has the power to inform better patient decision-making and outcomes. The data available in EHRs can also be used to reduce no-shows, automate scheduling, send reminders, and reduce administrative errors. As AI capabilities advance, the possibilities are truly endless.
A modern EHR should use at least basic AI to create a better provider and patient experience, and be forward thinking about expanding the capabilities using the data a clinic is already collecting.
Ultimately, it is important to remember that an EHR impacts almost every aspect of your practice. It’s the central source of all patient data and the single most used piece of technology in a facility. Because of this, it is important that every behavioral healthcare practice has an EHR that best serves its unique needs – supporting staff, empowering the most informed decisions, and making everyone’s life easier. The good news is many modern solutions are designed with this in mind.
Khalid Al-Maskari, CEO and Founder of Health Information Management Systems (HiMS).
The views expressed in Perspectives are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Behavioral Healthcare Executive, the Psychiatry & Behavioral Health Learning Network, or other Network authors. Perspectives entries are not medical advice.
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