EHR Adoption in Ambulatory Care: Benefits, Challenges, and Best Practices

Rapidly evolving technological advancement in healthcare opens the gateway for a vast range of innovations and solutions for healthcare practices. One such comprehensive solution that made a huge transition in the healthcare industry is the EHR system.

EHR (Electronic Health Records) systems have provided a great benefit to healthcare practices by reducing the paperwork, managing and organizing patient data, streamlining the workflow, automating repetitive administrative tasks, and more. Just to name a few.

While an EHR system enables healthcare practices to optimize workflow, it also empowers patients by giving access to patient health records. The Specialty of the EHR system is that it works not on general healthcare practice but on specialty healthcare such as Dermatology, Cardiology, Neurology, Pediatric care, etc. 

One such healthcare specialty that gets benefits from the EHR is Ambulatory Care. This Blog post will walk you through:

• The Benefits of EHR Adoption in Ambulatory Care
• Best Practices of EHR for Ambulatory Care
• Potential pitfalls needed to navigate

Ambulatory EHR System

Ambulatory care refers to Outpatient surgery. In common, ambulatory care has a tight schedule for physicians and staff. There are high chance that errors may occur during the traditional method. This is where the Health IT solution comes into play. An EHR system is a customized electronic health records system for ambulatory care that helps to manage and organize patient’s health records digitally. It provides specialty recommendations, writes prescriptions, and documents patient interactions, enabling ambulatory healthcare clinics to concentrate more on precise diagnosis.

A Study reveals over 90% of healthcare practices use Ambulatory EHR systems and significantly improve better quality of care for patients. Ambulatory care experienced a 47% increase in productivity after implementing the EHR system.

Related: Best Practices for EHR Requirements Gathering in Family Medicine

Best Practices of the Ambulatory EHR System

Conduct Thorough Planning

To achieve maximum efficiency, ambulatory care practices must conduct thorough planning before choosing and implementing the EHR system. Ambulatory care practices must consider factors like clinical workflows, data needs, and desired functionality.

In this process, the ambulatory care practices must involve all the staff, and key stakeholders during the planning process to ensure better outcomes.

Leverage Templates and Macros

If you want to streamline the administrative workflow, leverage the customized Ambulatory care templates and macros to automate the documentation process. The Ambulatory EHR System has an automated data entry feature that will automatically fill the patient’s information in the pre-made templates for effective documentation.

This feature enables improved consistency, improves efficiency, reduces data entry errors, and saves more time for staff and providers to focus more on better patient care.

Monitor and Optimize Over Time

Ambulatory care practices are required to evaluate the EHR usage post-implementation and optimize the system and workflow. Adjust the templates based on the ambulatory care needs and requirements, order sets, etc. as needed. For maximum efficiency, consider utilizing the analytics to identify problem areas.

Engage Patients Via Patient Portals

To make it more beneficial, consider empowering the patient via patient portals to actively participate in their care. With the help of the patient portal and EHR, you can effortlessly share the patients’ up-to-date medical information digitally, neglecting the need to collect health records in person. 

Ambulatory care practice should consider educating the patients about the importance and how to use patient portals. Teach them how to use the patient portal for efficiently scheduling appointments, Rx refills, and lab results viewing available.

This accessibility to patients will ultimately encourage patients to be proactively involved in their healthcare journey.

Interoperability

Seamless exchange of patient data between healthcare systems is crucial for better coordinative care for patients. Exchange patient’s medical data securely with other healthcare providers, labs, pharmacies, and health information exchange. 

This connectivity between different provider’s healthcare systems will lead to ultimate care coordination, ensuring a better patient experience.

Utilize Clinical Decision Support

Healthcare practice can utilize in-built clinical decision support tools in an EHR system for medication interaction alerts, clinical guidelines, and reminders. Clinical decision support tools can also provide evidence-based input during patient visits.

Related: The Ultimate Guide: Clinical Decision Support & Patient Outcomes

Benefits of Ambulatory EHR

The EHR offers many benefits for outpatient surgery::

• Patient Safety and Clinical Outcomes: The EHR system allows access to complete patient records including medication, lab results, allergies, etc. in one place, allowing the healthcare practices to make more informed clinical decision-making that will lead to better patient care. 
• Improved Efficiency and Cost Savings: EHR eliminates the paperwork and manual data entry process allowing the staff to be more productive. Automating appointment scheduling, e-prescription, billing, and reporting leads to time and cost savings.
• Care Coordination: An EHR system securely shares patient information with other providers. This improves care coordination, reduces duplication of tests, and avoids medical errors.
• Enhanced Patient Experience: If the Patient gets every medical record, lab test, and medication with convenient and coordinated care, leads to enhanced patient experience.
• Improved Clinical Performance Reporting: The EHR system allows the Ambulatory care practice to track the vital metrics of the patients and reports to payers. This will show the quality of care required by pay-for-performance programs.
• Billing, Coding, and Revenue Cycle Management: The EHR system will seamlessly integrate with the billing system to provide accurate coding and ensure reduced medical claim denials.
• Improved Regulatory Compliance: EHR systems ensure practices meet the requirements for information privacy, security of patient health records, and healthcare regulations.

Challenges and Solutions of Implementing EHR in Ambulatory Care

During the process of implementing the EHR, Ambulatory care practice might experience potential challenges. Here is the List of Potential challenges and solutions for Implementing the EHR system in Ambulatory care.

Challenges

• Upfront Cost: The Upfront Cost which includes purchasing and implementing the EHR system in Ambulatory care can be daunting for the practice. Cost includes software, hardware, technical support, and more.
• Lack of IT resources: Smaller ambulatory care may lack the IT infrastructure, expertise, and support needed to implement the EHR system.
• Workflow Disruption: The Ambulatory care practices may be familiar with the traditional paper record methods. The transition from paper records to digitalized solutions can disrupt the existing workflow of ambulatory care.
• Technical Hurdles: Some healthcare providers and staff in the ambulatory care practice may not be familiar with handling the software before. So, adopting the technology might be a huge barrier to healthcare practice.
• Diagnostic Inaccuracy: Most commonly in ambulatory care, the maximum time of each patient visit is estimated at 15 to 20 minutes minutes. As such, healthcare providers are required to make quicker decisions without relying on electronic health records. This will lead to inaccuracy in patient diagnosis and treatment.

Solutions

• Consider relying on the Federal and State Programs that provide financial incentives for healthcare practices for implementing the EHR system.
• Work with reliable IT consultants who can properly implement the EHR system based on your Ambulatory care workflow.
• Don’t implement the EHR system all at once. Consider slight transitions like basic documentation, order entry function, e-prescription, and more. Make sure to train the staff and providers to unleash the full potential of EHR systems.
• Conduct in-depth training sessions for healthcare providers, and staff members to adopt the technology.
• Use decision support tools like algorithms, and protocols that provide quick evidence-based decision-making for common conditions seen. 

Vozo Ambulatory EHR System

Small healthcare practices like Ambulatory care require a more streamlined process and workflow. The EHR solution will help you to digitalize the workflow and streamline the process.

Whether you are looking for a reliable EHR system to implement or decide to switch from the old legacy EHR, Vozo is here to help you. We are professional experts with years of experience in the field providing quality service for our clients.

Vozo’s EHR system offers a vast range of benefits for the Ambulatory care practice.

• Streamline the Ambulatory care workflow and speed up the process
• Easy transition from paper workflow to digital workflow
• Provides complete access to patient’s up-to-date medical records
• Accurate reports and analytics
• Our EHR system continues to scale as your healthcare practice grows
• 24/7 Tech support to assist you with any needs and requirements

Our EHR system allows you to manage all the patient’s records under one roof reducing the heavy workload for your healthcare practice staff.

Trust in Vozo EHR as we reduce your burdens and let you focus more on better patient outcomes.