Electronic Health Records For Dummies

Categorizing key EHR benefits

When you create your spreadsheet that lists your EHR costs and benefits, add categories in the Benefits section. Developing your benefits framework helps your stakeholders see where your benefits reside so they can better visualize how an EHR can help your practice. Here are a few categories of long-term EHR benefits that can serve as a framework for monitoring and measurement:

Patient safety and quality: Improved decision making, access to records, overall quality, overall patient safety, reduced errors, firm clinical guidelines and decision support, and increased information sharing.

Financial benefits: Improved charge capture and documentation, reduced transcription costs and staff expenses, increased patient volume and profit, improved collection rates, decreased claim denials because of coding errors, elimination of transcription costs, and expanded office space.

Efficiency and operations: Improved workflows and prescribing methods, decreased charting time, improved patient scheduling efficiency, short turnaround time for insurance claims and lab results, increased access to patient information, and less time spent returning calls.

Stakeholder satisfaction: Increased and improved customer service, decreased patient wait time, greater employee retention, and more patient interaction time.

The best benefit, hands-down, is universal chart access. Physicians, employees, outside specialists, pharmacists, and diagnosticians can (with the proper access) ...