Treating behavioral health is a specialty unlike any other medical condition. Electronic healthcare record (EHR) solutions should reflect the unique nuances of patient care. Below are five key features every mental health practitioner should look for when evaluating EHR options.

It’s quite clear that small typographical errors can result in major consequences. A simple transposition of numbers in a patient’s birth date or a mistake in the name of a disease or medication are examples of mistakes we want to eliminate in medical practices. Attention to detail and being diligent about catching mistakes must be balanced with meeting the data entry objectives that you’ve established for your staff (such as completing a certain number of records per hour). You want to guard your revenue stream, but not to the point where things slow down to a crawl.

In order to capitalize on patient engagement, medical organizations must understand the term, and how proactive patients directly and indirectly impact the revenue stream. Vincent Dumez, Faculty of Medicine - Université de Montréal describes robust engagement policies as not just developing a patient-centric healthcare model, but welcoming patients into the care-team, giving them an integral role in their own medical care.

Medicine in the United States has evolved over the past two hundred years from a combination of care delivered by self-taught, country doctors, wives, and mothers using herbs and home remedies and a few formally trained “bone-setters/surgeons” into a complex, computer-assisted network of highly-skilled specialists connected via smartphones and integrated healthcare management technology. As our nation strives to design affordable, value-based care models, the electronic health record (EHR) becomes increasingly more important – for patients and providers. The patient portal is a critical component in every EHR that doesn't always receive the attention it deserves.

The information that is routinely collected and stored in medical practices presents a tempting target to malicious computer criminals bent on stealing patients’ identities. Hackers also keep banging against computer networks as they attempt to install malware to cause chaos and confusion, extort organizations for money, and even gain bragging rights within their community by taking over systems and websites.

Is your practice still using a paper-based records system? Have you wondered if the benefits of implementing an electronic health record (EHR) system are worth the hassles of converting your files to digital format? This article provides a fact-based comparison of paper-based systems and EHR patient files management.

A simple software solution may be right under your nose, ready to help you make life easier for every member of your medical organization as well as each patient. The patient portal that you can activate with your electronic health record software will save everyone time and effort.

How well would your medical practice function if something went awry with your computer systems and access to medical software was spotty or completely unavailable for a day or even longer?

How do you stand out in the crowd? If a person has just moved into your city and is looking for a new doctor without a referral, how easily would your medical practice come to his or her attention? Consider that a potential patient will likely go online and search for terms such as “doctor” or your specialty along with the name of a city or county to find a local healthcare provider. Besides doing some basic research, patients will be paying attention to what they see on various social media platforms.

Controlling expenses is becoming a priority at your medical practice, and you now have a mandate to examine your labor requirements in an era of cloud computing. If you have been relying on local servers to host your electronic health record software, your setup will naturally need people on staff to maintain the hardware, software,and network integrity. Depending on the size and scope of your organization, you may need your systems up and running 24/7, which adds to labor costs even more for your mission-critical software setup.