Managing health data, and managing it well, can be one of the biggest headaches in modern medical care management. No matter how you store your data, records need to be properly stored, updated, protected from unauthorized access, and audited.
Your long-term care facility may have an existing electronic health record system, but it could be outdated, leaving you feeling frustrated when trying to access data or pull accurate reports. If you’re utilizing paper charts, these struggles are even more noticeable. Staff has to share and manage hard copies that can be easy to misplace, cumbersome to update, and difficult to review.
How Our EHR Software Solutions Can Help
You want to provide high-quality patient care for those in your facility, implement smooth systems for your staff, and meet your business goals, but your data storage and management may be holding you back. If you haven’t implemented EHR software or need a software upgrade, we’d like to encourage you to consider the following reasons why using specialized software solutions is the next best step for you to improve your systems, content management, and document workflow at your facility.
Improve Systems
Operating in streamlined systems is crucial for busy long-term care facilities. With so many patients and so much to do every day, you need efficient systems in place. But if you’re spending time trying to locate hard-copy medical records, printing forms to add into data files, and decoding quick handwriting, your systems are going to be slowed and your staff will be backed up.
This inefficiency often leads to decreased referrals, stressed practitioners, and staff working extended hours to properly manage the incoming and outgoing data. This also pulls staff away from the main goal of providing quality care to the patients within your care facility.
An EHR with advanced document management can:
- Manage billing efficiently
- Allow 24/7 access to client charts for information sharing among the care team
- Improve patient and provider communication through electronic document and form sharing
- Increase productivity of your staff while decreasing the associated risk of moving paper between clinical professionals
By improving the areas listed above, you can ensure staff is operating efficiently within regulatory compliance while providing each patient with the quality care they deserve. This results in cost reductions, improved patient health and happiness, far less staff turnover, and better preparation for auditing.
Manage Content
Caring for patients well requires the management and comprehension of a large amount of data. You need the ability to review historical data, see up-to-date prescription lists, and update health records to provide the best and most accurate care to your patients. The safety and effectiveness of your treatment depends on an accurate understanding of patient data, and future treatment depends on new data being added seamlessly.
Hard-copy paper records are bulky, difficult to review, and hard to update with new data and an out-dated EHR system may alleviate some of those concerns, but can leave you with many data gaps while managing content.
By moving your data into an innovative EHR, you can:
- Quickly access patient records from a variety of locations
- Communicate patient data with other medical professionals
- Scan paper and electronic documents into the patient record
- Share records across multiple staff members at the same time
- Allow sorting through client electronic charts with view, search, redact, combine, print, and email capabilities
- Update records in real-time to ensure the patient record has the most accurate and up-to-date information
With these technological advances, your team will be equipped to provide high-quality, accurate, safe, and effective treatment to your long-term care patients, and maintain accurate data for future care.
Streamlined Document Workflow
Organizing your document workflow means no data goes missing and records are stored securely. With a large volume of data being stored, accessed, and resourced daily, it’s important that the workflow is defined and efficient to manage this process well.
This data is mission-critical to providing quality and accurate care for all patients in your care facility, so protecting this data is of utmost importance. Streamlining your document workflow also ensures that you are prepped and ready for an efficient audit when necessary.
An EHR with advanced document management can:
- Allow access to authorized staff only
- Increase audit efficiency and accountability with reporting on all document activities and access
- Keep document images and data encrypted and stored on a secure server where the originals and unalterable
- Ensure business continuity with the integrated document archive to provide access to client charts in the event of a disaster
Setting up your document workflow to properly store and encrypt data is of major importance when caring for patients. It can be easy to put this low on the priority list when quality care comes first, but quality care also ensures the security of patient data.
Get EHR Software Solutions Designed for Long-term Care Facilities
Managing your facility’s health data well is key to providing high-quality care and balancing profitability. At Collain Healthcare, we understand that finding the right software to fit your needs can feel impossible. Our EHR software solutions can take your care facility to the next level through improved systems, content that is easy to manage, and defined document workflows. Schedule a free demo with us today to see how we can help you improve your day-to-day processes with a document management system designed for long-term care facilities in the health industry.
