You run a small practice, but you have big ambitions for the healthcare services that you want to deliver to local patients. When your organization first opened its doors and you were smaller than you are today, a paper-based system for keeping track of patient records seemed like a reasonable approach. But as time goes by, you discover that what you really need to do is install electronic health records or EHR software.

It’s pretty difficult to imagine any business setting up shop today without using computers and special software for whatever industry it is set in. The same goes for the medical profession. Chances are that you either have heard of electronic health record systems and know that you need to deploy one in your practice, or you have been laboring with some kind of generic application to store patient information, and it has not been able to meet even your most basic computational requirements.

We live in an era of accelerated change with constant innovation in technology, including medical equipment, computers, and software that never stay the same for very long. While your primary focus is on providing outstanding healthcare service, you have to devote some time and attention to staying up-to-date with all your technology too, since we rely so much on devices and applications to provide medical services.

The more actionable information that you can collect on the patients you treat in your practice, the more opportunity you and your staff have to provide excellent, state-of-the-art care. These days, many medical practices are looking beyond the confines of their own data center and are starting to migrate some of their computational infrastructure into the cloud. Cloud computing services provide a range of advantages to organizations large and small, and the medical profession in particular stands to benefit a great deal because of the convenience and ease of data management.

A patient portal is not the door that people walk through to get inside your medical practice. It is the term given to the electronic portal that you can enable for them thanks to your electronic health record software. Essentially, it is a way for patients to log into their account to check on details of their healthcare and to ask questions of the staff, with information protected by robust security.

When you run an orthopedic practice, your staff will have different processes and needs to address as compared to other specialties as well as family doctors. For example, you likely will have more referral patients, coming from emergency rooms, pain clinics, and general doctors, with the need to share information with these various entities to keep them updated on the progress of the patients.

For the uninitiated, when someone in the medical community mentions “EHR,” he or she is talking about electronic health records. An EHR is a vital application that is becoming nearly indispensable in most medical organizations, including those that treat Medicare and Medicaid patients and want to receive financial rewards from the government in exchange for demonstrating meaningful use of certified, up-to-date EHR technology because of the efficiencies it enables.

Doesn’t it seem faintly ridiculous that patients have to jump through hoops to get access to information that, since it is in digital format, would be so readily available to them? Today’s patients are quite accustomed to being able to access data on demand, from whatever location on Earth, as long as they have Internet access and a mobile device or laptop computer.

Work in your medical practice can become so intense, with nearly every spare minute already scheduled for important, pending tasks, that it can sometimes be difficult to see that there are labor-saving options that you simply haven’t yet been able to budget time and resources to investigate.

It almost goes without saying that the needs of pain management practices are quite different from those of other specialties. Addressing the needs of patients coping with acutely painful situations and managing patients’ chronic pain properly while meeting law enforcement requirements can spell the difference between a relatively speedy recovery or prolonged care that may include complications.