The Burgeoning EMR Market

The EMR market is driven by the increasing usage of EMR systems due to the need for provision of quality care, cost-savings and government incentives and advocacy.

According to Kalorama Information, the global information research organization, the global market for EMRs in the year 2013 was valued at $23.2 billion.

Mary Ann Crandall, Kalorama Analyst stated, “We think adoption and upgrading activities will still be stimulating growth in 2014-2018; as new systems are sold, companies will still earn revenues from existing clients in servicing and consulting services.”

The report suggests that the industry will continue to grow, although at a slower pace with hospital EMR adoption taking over practice EMR adoption. Furthermore, the threat of government penalties will render practices to train staff on new systems and expedite the overall change in the way care providers practice medicine.

Mary Ann Crandall further stated, “We estimate a quarter to a third of customers would like to switch EMRs and may look into replacing their current vendor. The main reasons for dissatisfaction with the system they have include lack of key features, a cumbersome and complex interface, poor EHR usability, and bad hardware”.

The report by Kalorama includes revenues for EMR systems, CPOE systems, installation, training, servicing as well as consulting which are highly profitable areas for organizations.

Indeed, with programs such as Meaningful Use still on the roll, there is still room for more practices to switch to EMRs. Increased online support for modern technology such as EHR/EMR, Practice Management Systems, Patient Portal and interoperable innovative medical devices have resulted in a surge of interest and adoption of EMR and EHR softwares across the country.

This is for those Who are Hesitant about EHRs

As Healthcare IT has evolved, it has brought in various technological modern innovations that have promised to make every process more efficient and cost effective. With the Health IT evolution, Electronic Health Record (EHR) Software have joined the game and gained momentum over the last 5 years. The government has spearheaded the campaign to promote usage of EHRs by encouraging practices to take part in the Meaningful Use program and earn thousands of dollars in incentives.

Many practices have come a long way in utilizing EHRs for their benefit, and making sure they remain eligible for the incentive by meeting certain criteria set out by the government. Still, there are many practices that are unwilling, hesitant or just nervous to investing in such technologies that will change the way they do their work – and rightly so.

It is all about change. I grew up reading that change is inevitable. That it is good for you. A little change always helps. That one should always be ready to adapt to changing circumstances. Now, practices can choose to stay the same and not move forward. They can choose to believe that if they keep doing things the way they have been doing them, everything will be all right. As much as I wish that was the case, and that using paper, and having a traditional by-the-book workflow at the practice could work forever – that is not the case. Really.

Let me tell you what will happen If you remain adamant and never try to implement an EHR at your practice. You will become obsolete. Yes. You will lose out in the race with your competitor practices. More than half the physicians in the country will be using interoperable Electronic Health Records that would be connected with laboratories as well as pharmacies across the countries, getting their Meaningful Use incentives and getting certified along the way. You, on the other hand, will be writing scribbled notes on post-it notes and using paper for most modes of transactional communication. Even though, using paper might not be bad in itself, it will keep you from improving, from getting cost efficiencies that paper will never allow.

Read more: 9 Steps to Successful EHR Implementation

What general surgeons need from their health it software

Every physician has a specific specialty which has its own unique set of challenges. As a result, it requires different software capabilities. So what is the most ideal health IT software for general surgeons? Let’s take a look.

State of General Surgery

General surgeons primarily focus on diagnosing, managing and performing operations for conditions located in the gastrointestinal tract, abdomen, endocrine system, breasts, blood vessels, skin and soft tissue.

On average, 42% of general surgeons suffer from physician burnout – the 7th highest percentage among physician specialties. The primary reasons cited include excessive bureaucratic tasks, lengthy work hours and the oncoming impacts of the Affordable Care Act.

What functionality general surgeons require?

General surgeons provide a wide range of care and hence, require a unique set of needs when it comes to the software they use to treat their patients.

Because general surgeons tend to split their time between different locations, portability of patient info is extremely important. Cloud-based EHRs come in handy in this regard as they can be accessed via any computer with an Internet connection.

The ability to read and send lab results is also critical to general surgeons. Their EHR needs to be able to easily access results for pre-surgery blood tests, Partial Thromboplastic Time and complete blood counts (CBCs).

The breadth of specialty means a large volume of new codes to learn under ICD-10, so general surgeons require a PM system equipped to handle the arrival of an estimated 60,000 new medical codes. In fact, general surgeons should consider outsourcing medical billing to an external agency to alleviate the burden of ICD-10.

A quality EHR can organize patient encounters into one, easy to access location, leading to better patient results for specialists. If you’re a family physician in the market for a new EHR, download this whitepaper today for answers to your most challenging questions.

Things to look for when evaluating an EMR Software

Practices need to evaluate the different kinds of EHR/EMR Software available in the market before making up their mind about a certain EMR System. Some of the tips needed in evaluating the EMR Software are mentioned below:

• Know the company

You need to read and find out what others are saying about the company? Forums, message boards as well as review websites usually talk about the EMR companies both positively and negatively. Read the customer feedback as it helps you know the issues and qualities related with the certain EMR. Google keywords such as EMR, EHR companies appearing in the top results are usually the ones that are popular among the clients and get a lot of traffic.

• Focus of the Company

Find out if a particular company focus on only one specific specialty (i.e. Rheumatology, Chiropractic, Neurology etc ) or they try to cater everyone? Opt for those EMR companies that focus on a particular specialty or offer specialty specific EMR. Rather than those companies that offer EMR for all the services and specialties.

• Beta Mode

When a company is in the Beta testing mode it refers to customers using the product and giving feedback to the company. If company is in Beta Mode ask how long they have been in Beta Mode. A long Beta period such as3 -5 months indicates a product that is not well received by the customers and is there are many bugs and issues associated with the product.

• Growth Charts

Find out the growth the company had in recent years. Being in the business for a long time does not necessarily mean the product is good. Which company you would rather choose: a company that is in the business for 20 years with 8000 users or a company that is doing business for 3 years with 5000 users. The latter system has received much better growth than and is well-known. Whereas the former company has a slow growth line or their users are declining. Neither of this is good for the users of that system.

• Retention Ratio

Retention ratio refers to how many users are still using the system compared to the ones that leave. No single system works well for everyone so after a certain time each system will have a decline in its users. Tricky part is to find the retention ratio. It is usually determined based on the term of the contract. Let’s say in a company with one year contract 900 users renew this year and 135 users quits this will equals to a retention rate of 85%. Anything above 90% is good and above 95% means company has a strong future.

• Company size

The size of the company’s team will help give clue about the ability of the company to grow. Look for those companies that have well defined separate sales and support teams. As this will not only keeps the users satisfied with the service but indicates that the company has the ability to pay several people rather than one or two. How to tell if the sales and support are different in a company? Call the support number and check if the same person answers the call. Look for the companies that grow their teams.

• Solvency

Look for a company that is solvent as it will spend more on the marketing as they want to grow. This will quality marketing material such as good website, recent blog posts, regular press releases as well as advertisements in the Industry. If a certain company has a website and it looks outdated, it signals a trouble for the company as it would cost a lot of money to have a dynamic and running website. The overall branding of the EMR Company will provide clue to the solvency power of the company

Keep an eye on these indicators and take out those companies from the lists that do not meet the criteria. As it will get much easier to manage a decision that makes you comfortable

How can physicians improve employee satisfaction at their practice?

In the service industry, it is crucial that organizations spend more on staff. The average payroll cost this year for Major League Baseball is 45% of the combined team revenue. That’s nearly half of what the team is earning throughout the season. According to the National Society of Certified Healthcare Business Consultants, roughly half of a practice’s operating costs are spent on staff.

Click here to learn about a state-of-the-art Electronic Health Record (EHR) solution from CureMD designed to improve workflows for physicians.

Physicians are highly trained and skilled individuals but quite a few of them suffer with their employee management skills. They are often ill-prepared and sometimes withdrawn to hire, train, manage or fire staff. So what are the most ideal ways to managing a practice’s most expensive and most required asset? Let’s discuss.

1. Know what you need: It is important to have written personnel policies for the practice. Everyone needs to know the entire flow and function of a practice in order to be expected to perform up to the required levels.
2. Know how to hire: Hiring someone who is very skilled but does not have the required skills will not get you anywhere. It is important to get the right person with the right attitude. See how the resource has been doing in his/her past experiences to be able to predict future behavior.
3. Train for results: Many practices fail to train their staff adequately. It is important to realize that you have to provide required training and then expect results.
4. Create performance expectations: Items such as dress code, work schedule adherence and HIPAA compliance are requirements of the job where failure to adhere results in termination. Remember, ongoing specific feedback is important for not only you but also for the staff.
5. Conduct purposeful reviews: Constantly reviewing and measuring performing against set benchmarks is crucial for success. You need to make sure that you inform the staff about their performance levels regularly in order to keep the performance up to the mark.
6. Be consistent: Don’t change policies every now and then. If you have established a set policy for the whole staff to follow, stick with it.
7. Praise publicly, give private feedback: It is important to give feedback to an employee privately if it is a negative one. Respecting someone in the public will go a long way in improving job satisfaction.
8. Motivate: In case nothing is working in case of an employee at your practice, try some unique motivational techniques to get the job done.

If all else fails, then maybe it is time to let the employee go. Remember, it is as important to let go of a sub-par employee as making your practice a success.

Patient EHR Education: A Slow Process

In a recent article published on the online survey conducted by Xerox, a company with over 75 years of experience in document management and helping organizations become efficient businesses, revealed that “majority of Americans (83 percent) have concerns, such as security, about EHRs and less than one-third (32 percent) want their medical records to be digital (compared to 82 percent and 26 percent in 2010, respectively).”

The notion of change is hardly encouraging, and with that in mind, how would providers fill the need to educate and involve their patients in engaging them in EHR Education? And as Healthcare providers who are seeking to achieve Meaningful Use Stage 2 incentives “which first become available for hospitals on Oct. 1, will have one year to make patients’ medical records available via online portals and must have 5 percent of their patients actually access the data. Currently, only 19 percent of the U.S. adults surveyed have access to their medical records online.” The stats are not encouraging as the push towards EHR adoption by Obama’s administration is clear.

As federal mandate demands that patients need to educate consumers about digital medical records. To train patients along with other staff members should be one of the top most priorities of the providers.

Familiarity with the Patient Portal is one platform, providers can use as a testing ground to improve provider-patient interaction. With Patient Portal, providers can schedule an appointment and communicate with their patients directly, by doing so they can avoid unnecessary visits of the patient to the practice. Training a patient to use online Patient Portal can be time consuming process, some patients may not be apt in using the online platform and it may very well be a headache for them.

To train require a special slot of time that providers need to take out for their patients. EHR education has been a slow for the patients primarily because of the untrained staff, and patients’ lack of interest in learning a new set of system which is either too slow or too difficult to learn.

As the EHR software improve and the need for patients to take active role in their patient engagement increases, the process of educating patients on EHR though a slow process will need to take an active part.

Read more: EMR Support – The Overlooked Questions

How are EHR better than EMR systems?

When it comes to using an EHR or EMR, one is far superior to the other. Let’s see which one performs advanced functions.

First of all, let’s elucidate how EHR and EMR are distinct from each other in a single word, interoperability. EHR is essentially an EMR with interoperability: the ability by which an EHR can share and exchange data among different platforms of healthcare. With one feature that makes EHR a better software than EMR, let’s move forward and see what other edges EHR has over  EMR.

EMRs limit the data of a patient to a facility. So, what happens in an EMR is that medical information of a patient is collected, changed, and discussed with providers and staff within a single organization. In the process of using an EHR, integrated data is shared, consulted, managed among more than one healthcare facility with providers and their staff; allowing providers and practitioners to be efficient in reaching out to the patient.

EHRs allow the information to be transformed systematically with the patient, allowing the process of going to a specialist, the hospital and even moving across states reachable between patient’s healthcare providers and practices. EMR lacks this capacity to reach beyond a single organization.

A simple yet very powerful feature of an EHR is that it reduces paperwork across platforms. The usage of data stored on printed paper is reduced by allowing the electronic data to be transferred seamlessly across multitudes of healthcare providers. EMR can save paper of a single organization, and the limiting factor of an EMR is that the data of a patient needs to be printed to take out of the organization while EHR because of its extensive reach is able to transcend this limitation.

EHR allows even the patients’ to see their past medical log for the past year. This compelling feature is absent in an EMR. It allows the patients’ to simulate energy in them to change their lifestyle; encouraging them to take medication with regularity, essentially decreasing the burden on the provider and improving their health.

With an , you can achieve higher Rate of Investment (ROI) by exchanging the data electronically among organizations, the healthcare providers save their costs in terms of reduction of staff members needed to mange patients’ data and the need to transfer patients’ information from one healthcare provider to another. Apart from that, EHR eliminates the need to do redundant tests on patients’ in turn saving costs.

In essence, EHR provides a higher degree of clinical decision making information by integrating patient data from numerous sources and with that it not only saves costs but proves itself a better system than an EMR.

Read more about: Avoid EHR Switching Mistakes To Save Your Practice From Unnecessary Costs

EMR – Thinking Outside the Box

Electronic Medical Records are an innovative tool for our healthcare system. With the paper file system running its due course, we have perfected it to the point where there are no further improvements or benefits derived.

Not just about record keeping anymore, EMR is transforming the healthcare industry. Electronic Medical Records not only overcome the limitations of traditional systems but offer unique possibilities of health information exchange, storage, access and retrieval. Data mining capabilities can add new dimensions to healthcare delivery along with medical research. Physicians can improve care quality through personalization and along with governments, determine better resource utilization to accommodate situations such as outbreaks and epidemics.

Slowly realizing the tremendous potential of interoperable EHRs, physicians, with the new age of healthcare knocking on the door, must adapt to newer technologies or risk becoming obsolete. A general health Florida based physician explained how he chose to adopt EMR “I had this lady come in with her grandson and she wanted me to provide her with an online health record along with access to the lab results. She explained how her grandson helps her look it up on the computer which saves her a phone call and sometimes even a trip. I just had to do it.”

With the advent of Accountable Care Organizations, the government is trying to replace the “fee for service method” with performance related compensation supporting evidence based practices. A dedicated fund for healthcare reform, the government plans to eradicate inefficiencies that have their roots deep inside the heart of the healthcare tree. Electronic Medical Record solutions are the answer for numerous problems faced by physicians today. From increasing productivity at the practices by streamlining clinical , administrative and financial workflows, EMR solution solutions are changing the face of the industry as we know it.

Read more: What you need to know about ACOs

EMR – Does Certification Matter

All key stakeholders in the Health IT industry such as care providers, experts, consultants, hospitals and practices are aware of the financial incentives instigated through the Meaningful Use program set up by the government. They are also aware of the requirements such as usage of Certified EMRs – a crucial component of the program that has been encouraging providers to adopt EHRs which have been certified. Hence, it is through the Meaningful Use program that the providers will be able to gain the incentives.

Considering that most physicians are not affiliated with modern technologies, many physicians in the United States do not have the awareness of Electronic Health Records and its certifications. Most think that an EHR software certified with CCHIT is the benchmark for a certified EMR  software product. What they do not realize is that it is not the approval of CCHIT that is the main requirement, it is actually the set of measures needed to be conformed to, based on which providers can get eh financial incentives for Meaningful Use. The set of measures include components such as the electronic recording of patient demographics, integration, and timely communication with patients, CPOE (Computerized Physician Order Entry), security parameters and information exchange with healthcare stakeholders.

An Ohio based consultant said, “The biggest dilemma amongst physicians, today, is the failure to understand the concept of Certified EHRs. Be it any industry, certification of a certain product comes by meeting the minimum requirements set by controlling authorities”

With the advent in modern technologies and regular upgrades to regulations by the government aimed at developing Electronic Health Records as an industry standard for the future, there is no doubt that such technologies provide physicians , patients and the whole industry with numerous benefits. It is therefore, crucial that providers select the right vendor and the ideal product for their practices.

A Nebraska based Health IT consultant said, “I can recall several so called “certified EHRs” which have caused disappointments amongst physicians. It is not always a one sided game, where vendors need to be careful while marketing their products. Physicians shouldn’t be negligent either while purchasing the product”.

Choosing an EMR – The Checklist

In the last part of this blog, I concluded that most care providers are unaware of the many different Electronic Medical Record (EMR) software solutions and the plethora of vendors making them available in the market. The notable reason for this is the general lack of awareness and how care providers are not tech-oriented, which is why they fail to comprehend the many advantages they can avail from EMR software’s and how getting to use one at their practices would be something unordinary.

I also pointed out that experts have suggested availing the full benefits of modern technology by opting for an EMR solution that is capable of integration with a Practice Management Software, Patient Portal and Medical Billing Service, so that providers can streamline and overhaul their clinical, administrative and financial workflows – making their work easy, efficient, profitable and reliable.

A Michigan based physician says, “My all-in-one EMR software solution is not only innovative but also affordable. From documenting clinical encounters to performing billing operations, I can do it all from a single platform. In fact, it is so affordable that even a solo provider could afford to automate practice workflows”

As the industry is moving towards patient engagement, and where patients want more control in their health care delivery process, it is important for providers to give them that opportunity. They can easily empower patients by opting for an EMR software that is integrated with a Patient Portal. This will also help providers in achieving Meaningful Use.

Also, another important point that providers should look at, Is whether they can trust their vendors for the products they say they are offering. Many providers would say that they are providing Patient Portals, when they might actually not – hence it is imperative that you choose a Certified vendor – who is CCHIT certified and HIPAA compliant so that you can qualify for incentives provided by the government.

As a care provider, you also have to make sure that you opt for a specialty specific EMR software solution, which caters to the specialties of providers at your practice. Research suggests that specialty specific EMR software’s help in improving productivity at the practice. Since the EMR software will be customized according to your specific specialty workflows, it will be easier for you to use the system.

The advent of modern technologies has lead to the evolution of EMR software’s as we know them. Clinical decision support systems, transcription, electronic prescriptions and point and click technologies have paved the way for EMR software success in the industry.

With every passing day, with patient’s health information being stored in EMR software systems across the nation, it has become crucial to safeguard such confidential data. Hence, providers should be on the lookout for secure systems which are in compliance with government security protocols.

Just like any other investment you make, an EMR software solution is your tool to optimize your workflows so that you get more reward from your business.