Electronic Health Records For Dummies

Reporting data

To manage patient groups successfully, you have to keep lines of communication wide open, starting with your care team. The team must create a means for patients to respond to and initiate care-related communications.

The push to communicate puts more responsibility on the shoulders of your care team to develop the workflow and messaging tools they want to use to interface with patients. Typically, the physician is updated but doesn’t have to perform the majority of the communication tasks.

You have several ways to inform your patients about their care management. You can go traditional, using snail mail or phone. Or, you can use your EHR’s communication features to help you generate automatic letters and calls, send e-mail, or send secure messages to a patient portal. No matter what method you choose to deliver information, make sure to get patient consent before initiating communication. Also, depending on the patient’s age or mental capacity, you may want to provide proxy access for a parent or caregiver.

A useful aspect of the EHR that your care team can make wide use of for care management is the EHR’s reminders and alerts. Again, the responsibility to create the parameters for how your practice uses alerts, what triggers alerts, and who receives alerts (nurse, case manager, physician, or patient) is on the care team.

If your team is a bit unsure of how best ...