When your medical organization researched and then purchased a radiological information system solution to implement at your facility, you may have done so with the idea that you would be helping your staff work more efficiently and take better care of patients. It may not have been immediately obvious that you can use such software solutions to connect with another medical practice. Now that more practices and other healthcare providers are going online and using software solutions that involve communicating over safe and secure networks, owners and managers of radiological practices are coming to see that it is beneficial to connect their RIS software with the referring physician’s EHR software.

So, your medical organization has decided to take the plunge and transition from an antiquated paper-based system to an electronic medical records software solution. The trouble is, you are low on time and want to make sure that you will only be looking at EMR software that has the most useful features. It can take some time to make sure you understand the ins and outs of EMR applications and what options you should expect to find when you implement this software in your office. To that end, here are five features that the best EMR software will have.

Not all medical practices will adopt emerging technology at the same rate. Some organizations have more resources and more forward-thinking people on their payroll, which means that they will use the latest software and technology solutions to make things easier on their staff and patients. Your behavioral/mental health practice may still rely on using an outdated, paper-based system to keep things running. However, this is an approach that you cannot expect to hang onto for very long, given the complexities of treatment protocols and the ever-increasing connected nature of healthcare providers.

The familiar prescription pad that doctors would scrawl on in their oftentimes terrible handwriting is becoming more of a relic of the past, thanks to expanding use of e-prescriptions. Besides cutting down on wasted paper and saving trees, e-prescribing provides a number of benefits to patients, their families, the pharmacy, and of course the staff at a medical organization. Here are three things that you need to know about e-prescribing.

If your oncology-focused practice has been getting by using an antiquated paper-based system to manage your day-to-day operations and the enormous amount of data generated and recorded for each patient, you have likely been looking for a computerized solution. This is why so many practices make an effort to look into bring electronic health record software into their facilities. Even a cursory glance at the available software solutions will show that it’s best to go with EHR software that has been developed with the unique requirements of oncology.

As the owner or manager of a well-respected oncology practice, you know that it would be a mistake to rest on your laurels or accept your current level of service as the best your staff is capable of providing. There is always room for improvement, and savvy medical professionals will take the necessary measures to step up the quality of their work. With that in mind, here are three steps that you can take to bring your oncology practice from good to great.

The following is an excerpt from an article on Corrections.com. It was written by Girish Navani. Based on recent research, there is a need for correctional facilities across the nation to implement electronic health records (EHRs) to ensure that inmates get the proper care. According to a national nonprofit group, The Treatment Advocacy Center, prisons and jails in the United States held over 356,000 inmates with severe mental illnesses in 2012. In fact, state prisons around the nation are urging government officials to implement digital health records.

The following is an excerpt from an article that appeared on Modern Healthcare. It was written by Joseph Conn. Hospitals are further along in upgrading their electronic health-record systems to where they need to be than had seemed possible only a month ago, according to new data from the CMS. After getting off to a sputtering start, nearly 3,700 hospitals have attested to meeting the program's meaningful-use requirements through Dec. 1 this year. More are expected to attest as the filing period draws to a close at the end of this month, Elisabeth Myers, of CMS' office of e-health standards and services, said in a report to the federally chartered Health Information Technology Policy Committee.

One of the most important aspects of working as a manager or owner of a medical practice is to monitor changes in the industry for examples of ways to cut down on costs, with an eye toward minimizing wasted effort and avoiding redundancy. If members of your medical organization are entering the same information about patients and details about each encounter into your system on a regular basis, this is a big waste of time and resources that you will want to address as soon as possible. The task of entering codes into the system has traditionally been one of drudgery and monotony, often making it fraught with human error. This typically occurs because someone on staff has to manually input the codes into the system from a paper Superbill that was completed by the doctor during the encounter.

The following is an excerpt from an article from Diabetes News Journal. It was written by Leonor Mateus Ferreira. There are still a significant number of people in the United States suffering from diabetes that are undiagnosed according to a collaborative study between researchers in the U.S. and in the United Kingdom, and recently published at the CMAJ Open journal. The research concluded that performing electronic health record (EHR) data analysis in patients may help determine undiagnosed diabetes, as it reduces both the time and the costs spent in identifying risk individuals.