Top 9 EHR Software Features for Pediatric Practice

Do you think EHR software implementation enhances the practice collections and revenue payments? EMR software implementation among pediatric practices lags behind other specialties, with 31% of pediatricians using a basic pediatric EMR and only 14% using a fully functional pediatric EMR solution. American Academy of Pediatrics suggests that EHRs may increase patient safety and standards of care.

Related : Pediatric Billing and Coding Services

The problem arises where too many pediatric EHRs lack the specialty-specific features that make implementation worthwhile for small and medium-sized pediatrics practices. Several practices require core EHR functionality such as documentation options, custom workflows, e-prescribe, and patient portals. Certain pediatrics features make the difference between an EHR that slows you down and disrupts your practice and one that boosts your productivity, improves patient care, and delivers accurate and positive ROI within a specific amount of time.

Here are 9 EHR software features that you should look into before making any decision.

9 EHR software features:

1. Immunization Status, Vaccine Tracking, and Clinical Decision Support
2. Routine Well Child Visits
3. Flexible Growth Charts
4. Family Dynamics Management
5. Flexible Privacy Permissions
6. Pediatric Medication Management
7. Pediatric-Specific Templates and Workflows
8. Must-have Pediatric EHR Requirements
9. Better Requirements

1. Immunization Status, Vaccine Tracking, and Clinical Decision Support

Vaccine Tracking:

• Pediatric EHR software must efficiently record vaccine data. Some of them even include bar-code scanning to populate the immunization record automatically. It must also allow easy manual entry of vaccinations given at other facilities.

Immunization Status:

• Once the vaccinations are provided, the EHR software must be capable of tracking and sharing immunization records across different formats as necessary. This is to comply with proof of immunization requests for schools and government agencies in the interest of public health and other institutions that need evidence of the vaccines.

Clinical Decision Support:

• Beyond everything, efficient EHR software involves immunization forecasting and clinical decision support to help reduce or eliminate both errors of omission and commission.
• Errors occur when healthcare professionals fail to utilize the opportunities and provide appropriate vaccines. Mistakes of commission happen when the incorrect vaccines are given.
• It also helps to identify situations that delay certain immunizations that achieve a better immune response.

2. Routine Well Child Visits:

• Proper child visit accounts for almost half of all pediatric visits. Your EMR should simplify the documentation and workflow for those encounters and provide a longitudinal record that tracks growth and change over time.
• Additionally, well-child visits are to be customized to populate developmental milestones and support age-based transitions. It includes fetal to newborn, newborn to childhood, childhood to adolescence, and adolescence to adulthood, with relevant functionality such as growth and development monitoring anticipatory guidance, and risk factor screening.

3. Flexible Growth Charts:

• The significant difference between pediatric EHR software and adult health record is the necessity to record, display, and compare growth measurement data on a small enough scale to accurately represent changes and fluctuations in a pediatric patient.
• Well-featured EHR software should be able to perform calculations such as growth velocity and BMI and present the measurements and accounting in a graphic format that can easily be printed and shared with patients.

4. Family Dynamics Management:

• Today’s families are dynamic structures that can change many times over a child’s transition from infancy to adulthood.
• Well-designed pediatric EHR software can identify and automatically populate shared family history, social history, and even billing data across related family structures.
• It’s an added bonanza and essential functionality for managing complex privacy and confidentiality issues across blended families and extended families.

5. Flexible Privacy Permissions:

• Almost all the 50 States will have adolescent privacy laws that permit young adults to get particular care without parental consent or notification.
• Pediatric EHR software must also have privacy settings that safeguard protected health information shared only between adolescents and providers while still permitting access to appropriate information by parents, step-parents, and guardians.
• Ideally, it also must allow clinicians to designate individual items with different privacy settings.

6. Pediatric Medication Management:

• In pediatric practice, weight-based dosage also complicates prescribing medication for children.
• Moreover, the range variability in pediatric populations is way more significant than in adults.
• Pediatric professionals see premature infants weighing just a few pounds all the way up to obese adolescents who can weigh 200 pounds or more.
• EHR should provide medication decision support, including dose calculations and rounding, range checks, and age adjustments or corrections.

7. Pediatric Specific Templates and Workflows:

• After well-child visits, management of chronic diseases and conditions such as asthma and add comprise the bulk of pediatric encounters.
• EHR must allow customizing templates and workflows to streamline documentation, monitoring, and management of clinical and treatment data.

1. Simple and easy-to-use well-child exam knowledge-based pediatric templates that require fewer clicks and drop-down menus.
2. Easy documentation of developmental milestones.

8. “Must-have” Pediatric EHR Requirements:

Birth History:

• Immediate and quick documentation as well as a review of prenatal and birth histories.

Easy Form Generations:

• Pediatrics EHR is used to quickly find and print with one click return to school, camp physical, or sports physical forms. Consent forms are immediately printed out and can capture parent’s signatures electronically.

Health Maintenance:

• It includes Health Maintenance and Preventive Care reminders in order to improve patient care.

Pediatric Dosage Calculator & Alerts:

• Up-to-date pediatric dosage calculators and drug interactions are fully integrated and accessible.
• An Alert system ensures appropriate treatment and safety.

9. Better Requirements:

• When a healthcare professional has determined “must-have” and “preferred” components of your Pediatric EHR and integrated the AHRQ-prescribed requirements, it’s time to move onto your “wish list”.
• Depending on particular requirements of the practice, the below can help in transforming an acceptable EHR into an extraordinary one:

1. Comprehensive EHR training for your staff that accommodates new staff hires, temp and contract office personnel
2. Multiple ways to chart notes, including point-and-click, voice recognition, handwriting recognition.
3. Data migration support when you are switching from your existing EHR
4. Total Low Cost of Ownership (TCO)

Security Measures to Protect EHR Software

Though EHR software solutions contribute greatly to the efficiency of the healthcare system, several provider organizations think otherwise. EHR software contains vital patient information that could be an easy target for hackers if they are not well protected. However, with the correct security measures in place, the EHR software solutions could store and analyze the patient health information without any issues while boosting the efficiency of the organization. Here are the security guidelines you need to follow:

• HIPAA and HITECH:

HIPAA and HITECH are the two building blocks of security guidelines that you must follow for complying with health information storage standards. EHR software vendors and professional medical billing services companies follow these two laws as a baseline for building their security guide. Processes like bank-level (SSL) encryption for secure data exchange could be another step forward in this regard.

Gartner reports show that several small and medium-scale provider organizations struggle to meet compliance measures when implementing the software technologies. However, professional RCM companies could be great outsourcing partners to help them with these issues.

• Regular Audits:

The stakes are pretty high when dealing with critical data like health information which often becomes a soft target for hackers to infect with ransomware. Maintaining cyber surfing hygiene is one of the most crucial things to do to navigate data breach risks. Audit trails prove to be the most helpful in this case. The audit trails paint a comprehensive picture of data access for the management or the IT department.

The audits can show which data was accessed, where it was accessed from, and the exact time it was accessed. Remote working conditions have thrown many organizations into the dilemma of maintaining security across various internet environments. Audit trails could answer a lot of questions easily for daily reporting.

• Encryption of Data:

Data encryption is a top measure followed by several healthcare organizations to maintain and protect the levels of access granted to the various users. Encrypting patient health records like historical data, prescriptions, and laboratory reports among others makes the data only accessible to authorized users. The best part about data encryption is that it can protect the data whether it is in transit or at rest.

Provider organizations often maintain different levels of access to the data according to the roles of the users. This role-based access level helps to improve the security perimeter, with a pre-defined area of data transfer when needed. Though data encryption is not mandatory under HIPAA measures, it could provide great benefits to your organization.

• ONC-ATB certification:

The Office of the National Coordinator – Authorized Testing and Certification Body authorizes any EHR vendor in the USA. Before diving into a software solution, you must check whether the product is certified by the ONC-ATB. The ONC-ATB evaluates the EHR vendors for components like security, functionality, and interoperability. An ONC-ATB-certified EHR product has gone through several levels of scrutiny. So when opting for one, you can be sure of the integrity of their service.

If you have already chosen an EHR vendor who is ONC-ATB certified, get in touch with them to learn more about what other security measures they are taking to ensure your safety. ONC-ATB certification is a building block of guidelines like HIPAA and HITECH. Usually leading EHR vendors go that extra mile to ensure that they are implementing updated technologies to keep your data safe.

Check for more options to implement better EHR software for your practice and continue to have seamless revenue flow. To know better about EHR in practice, please visit our blog.

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