Going digital: 4 benefits for behavioral healthcare providers
The care that behavioral health organizations provide is only as good as the tools and resources they’re using. One beneficial tool is an electronic health record (EHR), which gives caregivers a more complete picture of a patient’s health journey and current status, and simplifies tasks to help staff provide better care. Behavioral health providers need to ensure they’re prepared to deliver integrated care in the movement toward interoperability and transitioning to an EHR is one way to do that.
Here are four benefits to implementing an EHR in a behavioral healthcare setting:
1. Increased safety. EHRs help improve safety in many ways:
- Electronic notes in an EHR can help eliminate errors sometimes caused by transcription of handwritten notes.
- Allowing multiple users in the same record at the same time enables care providers to give real-time updates.
- Real-time alerts and prompts from an EHR reduce multiple manual steps, and clinical decision support helps providers with decision-making at the point of care.
- Improved communication between the interdisciplinary team internally and externally, as interoperability is becoming core to clinical practice, allows the clinician to treat patients more holistically and promotes safer care.
2. Reduction in denials and an improvement in reimbursement accuracy. This is due to more comprehensive documentation and improved medical coding. The move from paper records to electronic records was monumental in improving medical accuracy and positive results. For example, templates in the EHR can require certain questions and trigger additional clarifying questions to support the reason for the hospital stay; Medicare Certification and recertifications can be scheduled to ensure compliance and then routed to the physician for more timely signatures; medical coders can create multiple views of a record, helping them spot often-missed diagnosis codes and instantly initiate a query that is routed to the provider based on their findings. EHRs can be used to add additional edits prior to claims being sent to help combat technical denials.
3. Easier documentation of outcomes and data trend identification. EHRs can significantly improve risk management strategies by automating workflows that follow evidence-based best practices. As data is entered into the record, interventions are automatically triggered, which can help prevent adverse events. Built-in safeguards around orders and treatments make it difficult for providers to disregard best practices. EHRs can help predict individuals’ needs, mitigate risks, and allow providers to make better clinical and business decisions through aggregated data. Additionally, having access to this data gives users a way to see individuals’ complete healthcare journies. This data also helps organizations with their population health initiatives, especially those surrounding health equity.
4. Operational improvements. Because inventory orders, compliance records, and schedules are all stored in the EHR, inefficiencies or errors can be easily highlighted and corrected. Other functionalities can also help staff work more efficiently, like feeding real-time data into notes to complete charting, and tasks being documented into the patient’s record that automatically reduce inventory and send a charge to the claim.
Implementing an EHR at a behavioral health facility opens the door to more integrated care. Utilizing a tool that provides accessibility, safety, improved communication, and clear population and health analytics can lead to better overall care.
WellSky Specialty Care for Behavioral Health is a scalable, comprehensive health information platform, purpose-built for inpatient psychiatric hospitals and behavioral health systems. Learn how WellSky can support your facility’s path towards integrated care today. Request a consultation today!