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:
Immunization Status, Vaccine Tracking, and Clinical Decision Support
Routine Well Child Visits
Flexible Growth Charts
Family Dynamics Management
Flexible Privacy Permissions
Pediatric Medication Management
Pediatric-Specific Templates and Workflows
Must-have Pediatric EHR Requirements
Better Requirements
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Simple and easy-to-use well-child exam knowledge-based pediatric templates that require fewer clicks
and drop-down menus.
Easy documentation of developmental milestones.
“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.
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:
Comprehensive EHR training for your staff that accommodates new staff hires, temp and contract
office personnel
Multiple ways to chart notes, including point-and-click, voice recognition, handwriting recognition.
Data migration support when you are switching from your existing EHR
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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