EHR and Health IT Consulting

The 3 Main Categories of Healthcare Information Technology

There are three main categories of healthcare information technology that you’ll find in both hospitals and physician offices:

Practice Management

Practice management is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: it helps you manage the different aspects of your practice.  This category centralizes your practice’s various systems so you can run it more efficiently.  Practice management software automates just about every task that fits under the “health information management” umbrella.  They take away the stress and give you back the time spent on time-consuming tasks.  The overall goal is to help you provide better short- and long-term care.  To achieve this goal, most practices integrate other systems to truly centralize the platform (more on that later).

EMR

Electronic medical records software, or EMR, is one of the most popular medical software categories.  EMRs replaced paper records by making digital versions of charts and patient histories.  They have similar features to business intelligence, in that they can track data over time.  This alerts you when patients are due for preventive procedures and screenings.  In addition, EMRs help diagnose and treat patients by looking at their history and comparing their health data.  All these features allow you to provide consistently better long-term care.

EHR

Electronic health records software, or EHR, is another extremely popular category.  As you may have guessed by the name, they have similar functionality to EMRs.  An EHR provides health information management in the form of digital health records.  The differences from EMR begin, however, by providing a broader view.  EHRs include a patient’s history, diagnoses, treatments, medications, allergies, X-rays, test results and more.  Another advantage is the ability to share information.  While EMRs give a healthcare provider a great overview of a patient, they can only do so for that provider.  EHRs, on the other hand, can share patient data with other EHRs.  This allows a healthcare provider other than the patient’s primary provider to access the same information.  So when a patient moves or goes to an emergency room, they can still be properly treated.

The 4 Smaller Categories of Healthcare Information Technology

There are also smaller categories of healthcare information technology that aren’t as common.  These systems are often integrated with practice management software to provide robust functionality and better patient care.

Patient Portal

Today’s consumer expects more transparency and accessibility than ever before.  This is certainly true for the healthcare industry, where patients want access to their medical records.  You certainly can’t blame them, so patient portals were developed.  They’ve increased in popularity among hospitals and medical practices in recent years, and appear to become an industry standard.  Patient portals allow access to just about everything in an EMR and EHR, including their history, treatments, medications, etc.

Scheduling

Scheduling software oftentimes goes hand-in-hand with a patient portal.  This allows patients to login to the portal, view their previous treatments, receive an alert that it’s time for a check up and then schedule it.  Possibly the biggest advantage of scheduling software is reducing your phone traffic.  Rather than having to call every time they want to make an appointment, patients can just go online and do it.  Plus, in today’s digital age, they prefer to do it on their device of choice anyway.

Medical Billing

One of the more time-consuming tasks for practices is managing patient billing.  Writing up, sending and processing payments takes a lot of time, especially for busy hospitals and practices.  That’s where medical billing software steps in.  A medical billing system automates all of this, so you don’t have to think about billing at all.  If there’s an issue such as a late payment, the system alerts you so you can act accordingly.

ePrescribing

One of the last parts of an appointment is sending the patient’s prescription to their pharmacy.  In order to expedite the process, physician offices began using ePrescribing software.  In just a few clicks, a prescription is sent, filled and waiting for the patient when they get there.  This saves not only your time, but your patients’ as well.  Additionally, ePrescribing systems ensure that there’s never a prescription mix up due to, say, poor handwriting (no offense doctors).  The system displays the prescription to the pharmacy so they can ensure patient safety by giving the patient the right one.  A study by Decision Resources found that using ePrescribing software has increased the prescribing of generic drugs.  This furthers your mission of patient care by providing them with cost-effective medicine.

Although there are lots of different medical software categories, hopefully this list has helped clear up any questions you had.  If you haven’t used any of these systems yet, you might want to start looking into some options.  Just think of how much better you can run your hospital or practice with some or all of these systems.