Is your staff burned out? Here are 8 EHR must-haves to help reduce work-related stress across your practice

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Last year, an online HealthDay-Harris survey of physicians and nurses revealed that 63% of the survey respondents were experiencing moderate levels to a great deal of burnout at work. Physicians and nurses cited understaffing as the No. 1 reason for their burnout. The second leading cause of work-related stress cited by 58% of doctors and 51% of nurses? Daily paperwork.

According to Christine Sinsky, MD, vice president of professional satisfaction for the American Medical Association, much of the work-related stress can be attributed to electronic health records (EHRs). “Physicians are finding themselves with two hours of work every night at home. After the kids go to bed, physicians spend two hours on their EHR and desk work for every one hour of direct face time with patients,” she said about the survey findings.

While documenting patient visits and inputting patient data into your EHR can be a tedious task, your EHR platform should not make your work life more difficult. In fact, the right EHR can dramatically improve your practice’s workflow processes, help eliminate data errors, and ultimately enable you to build a thriving and financially stable practice.

Craig Cooper
_{© AdvancedMD}

But how do you know whether an EHR is the right EHR for you and your staff? Here are eight EHR must-have features that will help you accelerate your most tedious tasks so that you can drive serious productivity throughout your practice.

8 EHR must-haves to eliminate burnout across your practice

1. Transparent, secure and compliant communication portals

An EHR that offers transparent, secure and compliant communication capabilities is nonnegotiable in today’s health care landscape. Having a transparent, secure and compliant communication portal streamlines messaging with payers, hospital systems, other health care providers and other third parties. It also helps improve the practice-payer relationship by enabling fewer claim denials, amending reimbursement errors before they are a problem and reducing the amount of time spent troubleshooting patient data issues.

2. Data accuracy

Not only is patient data accuracy key to patient outcomes, it is imperative to your practice’s overall success. Glitchy, ineffective technology platforms that lack true automation and include minimal integrative capabilities will create more errors and lead to more time putting out fires versus time spent on strategic, meaningful work. Your EHR provider should prioritize data accuracy, helping your practice avoid errors while automating critical patient data workflows.

3. Data security compliance and support

With data breaches on the rise across the health care landscape, your practice’s EHR provider should prioritize data security and ensure compliance and regulatory standards are built into the technology. Your EHR platform should also adhere to billing regulations and document requirements, ensuring that your EHR solution complies with your payers’ data security standards, as well as other health care providers and hospital systems.

4. Integration with practice management and patient engagement tools

Implementing an integrative EHR that connects with your practice management and patient engagement tools drastically reduces the time spent inputting data and helps create seamless workflows across your practice, including claims submission processes. An integrative EHR that connects with the practice management side of your business can deliver real-time eligibility verification and automated prior authorization processes. Most importantly, your practice is able to create highly efficient claims management capabilities that enable a clean submission process with claim scrubbing tools, automatic payment workflows and an intuitive claims review process.

5. Comprehensive and customizable reporting capabilities

Reporting capabilities may seem like an afterthought when evaluating EHR platforms, but implementing an EHR that offers comprehensive and customizable reports can have a major impact on your practice. By analyzing various aspects of your business — including claim processes, reimbursement trends, claim denials, patient outcomes and staff productivity — you gain insights that can help you make changes for the better. An integrative EHR that is part of a unified medical office suite can significantly level up your measurement and monitoring capabilities, allowing you to establish clinical quality reports, total value relative value unit (RVU) and work RVU reports, financial reports, and procedure and Current Procedural Terminology-based reports.

6. Financial insights

In addition to reporting capabilities, a truly innovative EHR solution provides deep financial insights that can elevate practice-payer relationships and drive long-term financial stability for your practice. By identifying which providers and treatments have the biggest impact on your revenue, your EHR can serve as a cornerstone of your revenue cycle management processes, highlighting the areas of your practice that are generating the most revenue.

7. Tools that allow collaborative decision-making processes

Because your EHR acts as the central hub between your practice and payers, it should help accelerate and streamline payer communications — not create more work. When evaluating EHR providers, be sure to look for an EHR platform that enables easy and intuitive communication capabilities with your network of payers so that you can more easily resolve disputes and negotiate better reimbursement rates and contract terms.

8. A responsive support team

EHR platforms are complex, and even the most intuitive solution may be difficult to navigate for users unfamiliar with the technology. Your EHR provider should provide adequate training and support services, including onboarding and training programs, regular check-ins and updates on new features.

If you’re evaluating EHR providers, or considering replacing your current solution, use this list of EHR must-have features to quickly zero in on a platform that will go the distance. With the right solution in place, you’ll spend less time inputting data and more time providing care — a win for you, your staff and the patients you serve. Best of all, you’ll create a dynamic work environment that reduces burnout across the practice.

Craig Cooper serves as the group product manager for AdvancedMD, a cloud-based practice management, EHR, and patient engagement platform for independent medical practices. With more than a decade of experience as part of the AdvancedMD product management team, he is focused on building web-based and mobile applications that streamline workflows and drive productivity for private practice owners and their staff.