There have been various reasons that have resulted in numerous behavioral health physicians choosing not to implement an Electronic Health Record (EHR) or EMR at their practices. Among the reasons has been the fact that many behavioral health specialists were not eligible for Meaningful Use incentives, and thus chose to remain paper-based.
However, this article focuses on the benefits of these systems for the average behavioral health practice, and how the pros of these systems outweigh the cons.
Firstly, such systems can be an extremely safe and reliable avenue for data capture, and can be used by the users for the benefit of their patients; for comprehensive documentation of patient information that can be aggregated over time to create trends, and help in the treatment process.
Moreover, many behavioral health EHRs I’ve come across allow customization according to your needs and practice requirements. Apart from the initial customization that is used to accommodate your particular sub-specialty with behavioral health, this feature will allow you to edit and manage your templates and forms according to your preferences.
Furthermore, customization allows you to mark commonly accessed reports as your favorites list; this provides you faster access to such reports and is very beneficial in streamlining your workflows. You can also create customized reports according to your practice needs.
The next benefit is that of interoperability, which will allow you to readily communicate and exchange information with other hospitals, which will help provide you a more comprehensive patient description. Family links, social conditions and other such data which the patient fails to provide (either willingly or due to specific conditions), will help you ensure the best possible care strategy for the patient. This feature will also allow you to readily communicate with different labs and other health care institutions so that patient data such as X-rays reach you as soon as they are produced.
The aim of this article was to shed some light on the a few benefits of these systems so that you realize you can gain a lot by bringing a behavioral health EHR to your practice.
EMR Software 