Electronic Medical Records are now a vital part of the healthcare industry. They have been proven to improve patient care and reduce medical errors, but choosing the right product can be tricky. This blog post will provide you with all of the important requirements for your Electronic Medical Record system as well as information on how to choose which one is best suited for your practice.
What are Electronic Medical Records?
Electronic Medical Records are computerized records of a patient's medical history and treatments. They typically contain the following information: health summaries, inpatient/outpatients visits (including diagnostic testing), emergency department visit data, medications prescribed or administered to patients as well any allergies that may exist. They are electronic reports that replace patient charts and paper records.
Why do you require EMR?
As time has progressed, it has become increasingly important that medical documents and patient records be easily accessible to medical staff in a timely manner and at any location, all without compromising patient privacy or security.
What are the benefits?
The benefits of an EMR include: reducing the need for paper documents, saving money on transcription costs and storage space.
All while being able to provide faster service through electronic communication with providers as well as ensuring that patient data is kept safe at all times because they're not stored in a central location or off-site.
There are also many laws that protect patients’ personal health information from unauthorized use by other entities to which most of the EMR providers are compliant.
Choosing the right EMR system for your practice
Here are some of the things you should keep in mind.
For a medical practice, it's important to know what their needs are, and then find the right electronic medical record (EMR) software that will meet them. There are many considerations in buying an EMR: cost, functionality, compliance guidelines from government regulations for ensuring privacy protection, training requirements, etc.
Identifying the important requirements of EMR for your practice:
- Receiving and registering patients with a complete history which includes allergies, previous medical diagnoses, or current medications.
- Differentiating between different types of patient encounters ( in-patient, out-patient, preventive care, wellness) to ensure that the right type of data is recorded for each encounter.
- Recording diseases or symptoms takes in all the primary information which is needed to diagnose a particular disease or condition.
- Recording the vital signs of patients such as blood pressure, heart rate, and temperature.
- Recording lab reports and other medical data like x-ray reports, electrocardiograms, etc.
- Differentiating between the different types of drugs and lab tests: inpatient drug administration versus outpatient medication encounters.
- Keeping track of medications provided for similar symptoms, this feature can help in reducing the number of medication errors.
- Nursing notes and doctor's orders should be easy to access for both nurses as well as doctors.
- Transfer of data within the clinics and to different locations is essential for the continuity of care.
- Provisions for Hospital discharge summaries and other similar documents that are required by hospitals.
- Patient history and records are easily accessible.
- Provide secure backup of patient data, with a good disaster recovery plan.
- Provide a facility for patients to view their own medical records at any time.
- Provide insurance claim support for proper documentation and submissions which can be easily accessed by the providers for easy data entry.
- Training provided by the vendor for both providers and patients to ensure that they are aware of their rights, duties as well responsibilities.
These are a few of the important requirements to check out for in your EMR while you're considering purchasing one. The other factor to consider is comparing features, price, and after-sale services offered by different vendors, as well as understanding which system suits you best and what's compatible with existing infrastructure.
Insta By Practo is one of the most economical EMR solutions for your clinic. Make sure you ask our demo team to help guide you through all the features it has to offer and see if it's right for your practice.
Book now for a free demo.
