The following is an excerpt from an article originally published on Healthcare Dive. It was written by Meg Bryant. While there is still plenty of room for improving the usability of electronic health records (EHRs) and making them more affordable for care providers, experts are trying to get folks to focus on their future potential. The barriers to EHR implementation and interoperability are slowly coming down and once they do, vendors will start looking to add more functionalities to the systems.

Medical acronyms allow people in the healthcare industry to communicate more efficiently by assigning “nicknames,” or abbreviations, to processes, procedures and organizations. Although there are hundreds of acronyms and medical terms used every day in medical care, these 24 are important to every modern practice, if you want to take advantage of incentives and resources available to your organization.

Running a successful radiology practice requires a great deal of time and attention, with so many moving parts to keep track of. Practices that rely on antiquated paper-based systems to organize their work and maintain files on patients are at a distinct disadvantage when compared to competitive radiology practices that have embraced modern technology in the form of a Radiology Information System.

Medical practices both large and small are coming to see the benefits of deploying electronic health record software at their facilities. Making the transition from an old-fashioned, paper-based system for tracking patients’ charts to EHR software is not something to take lightly. But the longer you delay the inevitable computerization of your practice, the longer it will take to get your employees trained and up to speed with using the new system.

Implementing customized radiology EMR software modified to fit your practice can transform productivity and efficiency to improve both workflow and patient experiences. Paper-based systems have pain points that frustrate staff members and create bottlenecks that slow down collaboration and delay patient treatment. Making digital information available directly from an EHR patient chart encourages collaboration and informed-consultations in real-time, without waiting for printed records and films – or CDs – to be delivered via mail or courier.

Running a successful, busy medical practice is a tough job that can lead to a certain level of stress behind the scenes. There are a lot of moving parts to keep track of, which is compounded by the fact the health and well being of your patients depends on you keeping everything humming along smoothly. The systems you now have in place to organize and run the practice may have been suitable when you were first starting out and didn’t have quite the same patient load or even staff size as you do today. But now, as you grow in size and perhaps even add more specialists to the staff while you expand the types of patients you treat, it is becoming clearer that your practice needs the efficiency that specialized software can deliver. This is where practice management software comes in.

Electronic Medical Records are quickly becoming a must-have for any modern medical practice. More and more practices are finding that using the software allows them to spend less time tracking down patient information, and more time engaging their patients and growing their practice. Furthermore, this software greatly reduces data entry mistakes, and makes it easier to keep track of important patient and medical billing data.

When tax dollars are fed into the healthcare system, taxpayers will naturally have a vested interest in seeing costs lowered and efficiency improved. From family doctors to specialists of all types, there is a move toward promoting quality of care over quantity of care.

Telemedicine has evolved over the past few decades from simple telephone conferences into a technology rich solution connecting physicians, patients, clinicians, and researchers, facilitating more efficient and effective healthcare delivery. One of the key drivers of telemedicine expansion is the electronic health record (EHR) system, with advanced EHR software functionality.

Making value-based (VB) healthcare work doesn’t have to be challenging if the practice, group, or network has two things: (1) the proper automation tools, and (2) the resources on which to rely in transforming them from fee-for-service into VB. First, a little VB background. The Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA) is a law designed to encourage more medical providers, otherwise known as “Eligible Clinicians” or “ECs” in MACRA-speak, to embrace VB medicine. For 2017, CMS has designated MDs, DOs, DDSs, DMDs, NPs, PAs, CNAs, and CRNAs as ECs. If you’re one of these, and you’re not exempt, you can and should move into the VB medicine world of quality vs. quantity.