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.

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?

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.

Legacy electronic health record (EHR) software was engineered to facilitate building comprehensive patient records, primarily collecting clinical data. Electronic patient files compiled during the 1960's, 70's and 80's were definitely more complete, accurate and legible, but not necessarily easier to share. In the early 1990's as the size and price of computer equipment plummeted, more practice managers embraced the digital patient records concept and adoption rates soared.

You’ve been using your electronic health record software for quite a long time now, and at this point you are getting ready to compare the experience of using it with what you now about the offerings of competing EHR providers. Now you are tasked with evaluating new providers. The trick is in knowing whether you should stay with the old provider or move on to a new one. Here are hints to help you decide whether switching EHR providers is right for you at this time.

Every patient encounter that takes place inside your medical organization should result in new information being recorded. Details of the visit, whether typed into the Electronic Health Record application or spoken and converted to text with built-in speech recognition are added to the EHR. With all this information at your fingertips, the trick is to manage, organize and retrieve the data in a useful way for you and your team. You don’t need to be an IT specialist to appreciate the benefits of using EHR software, let alone how to find the information you need. Becoming more familiar with what is being stored and the ways your team can access it is crucial. Read on for details on how to get the right data from your EHR software.

As the manager or owner of a thriving medical practice, you know that it is prudent to routinely take time to look at the entire business and see how its processes are integrated. To that end, increasingly sophisticated software offerings are now available to medical practices to help ensure things really are humming along, and you don’t want to miss out on any potentially helpful solutions. Two “off the bat” solutions are systems are electronic health records (EHR) and practice management (PM). Many practices opt for an all-in-one EHR-PM system. Once set up, you have essentially deployed an in-house capability for revenue cycle management (RCM). Adding a patient portal will do wonders for increasing patient engagement and connectivity between practice and patient, and vice versa. With these thoughts in mind, here are four technology trends that indicate a healthy practice.

By now, you already know that deploying an electronic health records or EHR system in your healthcare organization is the key to maximizing time, giving your staff the tools it needs to do their jobs as efficiently as possible.