In today’s environment, it is crucial that home health tools can interface with the Electronic Health Record (EHR) system. With the increase in the number of elderly needing care at their homes, providers are nowadays adopting technologies to make their work easier.
Applying home healthtools with EHR helps ensure that patient information the healthcare professionals possess is non-segregated and up-to-date, hence enhancing the process of decision making. This smooth transfer of data between these two systems is revolutionizing the delivery of care and, ultimately, benefits the provider as well as the patient.
Advantages of Converging Home Health Software with EHR
The interfacing of home health software with EHR systems has a number of advantages offered to healthcare providers, patients, and caregivers. The first of these benefits is the enhancement of the quality and availability of data that can be produced by the organization. With integration, data from home health visits can be entered into the central EHR system where it will be accessed by other clinicians, thus eliminating the possibility of clinical errors due to transfer of wrong information. This enhances the decision-making process, hence making things safer for patients.
The coordination of the care which is offered is also enhanced in this type of system. It helps ensure that home health providers, primary care physicians, and other specialists will have equal real-time access to the medical record, for continuation of care in an uninterrupted way. This is also considered as most beneficial for patients with chronic diseases, as care is integrated and even when organized by multiple teams, there are minimized chances of overlap or contradiction.
Last but not the least, these systems can be interfaced to bring about significant administrative efficiency and cost cut. By doing away with data entry and paperwork, where the patient details are entered and copied many times, the flow of the health care provider can be enhanced. This efficiency also entails that the quality of service is enhanced by offering more time to patient care.
See also: Benefits Of Home Care Services In Fostering Social Engagement for Bountiful Seniors
Successful Integration Strategies
There are certain best practices which should be followed by healthcare organizations so that home health software may be integrated with the EHR systems. To ensure that it will be as beneficial as possible, first, choose the software that can be easily connected to the existing EHR system that you use at the moment. It is important to know that not all home health software platforms integrate as smoothly with every EHR. The home health software you select should be designed to be integrated or should be able to link via Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) before selecting the program.
Next, looking into data security and compliance as one of the crucial considerations. Healthcare data must be compliant with the regulations, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). So, prior to integration of home health software and EHR, you must ensure that both the systems are standardized to those regulations and some measures are taken to ensure that all patient’s privacy is protected.
