Do you struggle with patient data access in your EHR system? It's a common ailment: A 2018 Surescripts survey found half of physicians wished they had better insights available from their EHRs. Plus, 88 percent of respondents wanted to know if and where patients had received care elsewhere, but only 30 percent said they had an easy time finding this information.
There are many reasons these hurdles exist, including:
- Scale – Switching to a new EHR often involves having to transition thousands of records, while ensuring you're complying with a vast web of regulations about record retention. It's easy for something to get lost in the shuffle or documented incorrectly. More than 80 percent of notes in the Veterans Administration's EHR were once found to contain such errors.
- Interoperability – EHRs usually don't talk to each other since there's no standardization between them. As a result, you have to rely on tools that are standardized, which is fine as long as you have streamlined workflows when working with faxes, PDFs and more (fax alone accounts for 75 percent of all medical communications). Without them, you may spend too long implementing additional software and paying irritating one-off fees.
- Fees – Bodies like the Texas Medical Association have warned against a "multiplicity of fees" from EHR vendors, worsened by vague definitions of which services are included in the original price and which ones require additional payments. Fees may apply to interfaces to other systems like PACs that ideally would be built-in with the EHR.
An inefficient EHR takes a toll on your orthopaedic practice as well as your patients, many of whom face their own challenges in accessing their data. A 2018 Government Accountability Office report found that access fees were steep and highly variable. The best solution is to upgrade to an orthopaedic-specific EHR that consolidates essential functionality to make your life easier.
The advantages of Phoenix Ortho EHR | PACS | PM for data access
Phoenix Ortho is built specifically and exclusively for orthopaedics. It directly incorporates a PACS and a practice management platform, along with other efficiencies and features that save you the trouble of wrangling with multiple interfaces, vendors and fees. Here are just a few of the capabilities our EHR provides for simplifying data access for you and your patient:
- Integrated PACS with streamlined image order workflow: Easily order, retrieve, view, store and import images from internal or external source using Phoenix Ortho’s exclusive X-ray Medical Record.
- Patient portal: Send automatic email notifications to patients and allow them to update clinical records from their homes, using an application aligned with federal meaningful use regulations.
- Patient engagement (Phoenix Kiosk): Empower patients to quickly check and manage their histories using either a tablet or workstation at your office.
- eFax: Take advantage of streamlined fax recognition for painless migration of documents to patients' records, with automated notification delivered to appropriate staff.
- Workers’ comp automation: Auto-complete workers' compensation form fields, with the option to attach the completed WC forms to associated claims for submission.
- Reporting: Clinical data analytics are built into every Phoenix Ortho installation, allowing you to consistently find and contextualize information.
Administrators and physicians alike love the fact that, through Phoenix Ortho, all of these features and many more are available from a single vendor. It’s finally possible to say “no” to juggling a bunch of vendors and their disparate tools.
Upgrade to an all-in-one EHR | PACS | PM designed specifically for orthopaedics. Try a no-obligation demo of Phoenix Ortho today. Our team is also always available to help with any questions or concerns you may have about our EHR.