Just a quick question – Are you looking for a new Hospice Electronic Medical Records (EMR) for your home healthcare clinic or agency to enhance overall efficiency?
No matter your practice goes around home health, hospice care, palliative care, or private duty, you will need to leverage an integrated system that empowers medical professionals to access all crucial information instantly and communicate effectively.
Here is a checklist of key capabilities for your EMR Software. Consider it as it is crucial for your home healthcare facility in clinical, administrative, and financial processes.
1. Scheduling and intake management
A scheduling management feature is a key component of any EMR software solution. The primary requirement of your home healthcare facility is a collaborative appointment calendar that supports back-office staff and doctors. At the same time, you will also need a system that smoothly integrates all the patient details for handling intake appointments and scheduling the follow-up visits to the doctor.
With an effective EMR scheduling software, you can smartly optimize the complete workflow by providing the following tools and resources to your medical staff that covers checklists, action items, authorizations, alerts, and conflicts. This ensures compliance from the get-go while also providing a framework that reduces the margin of error. Along with the easy scheduling part, your medical staff and executives will certainly require a quick and easy tab on certain components that will help in a smooth intake process and further develop a concrete plan of action for appointments in the future.
A well-designed EMR software solution comprises potential features to optimize that very first appointment of the patient or consultation for building a detailed healthcare plan. It includes thorough assessment guides, critical items at a glance, best practice questions, PHQ-2 + PHQ-9, diagnoses, medications & vaccines, frequency of visits, and clinical orders.
Overall, an effective EMR software solution will amalgamate and acquire all necessary patient information, so the next steps remain clear and the regular operations run seamlessly.
2. Easy documentation and healthcare delivery
Managing home healthcare patient’s information and medical records is a highly risky task. Hence, an EMR with an intuitive & interactive interface is a must to handle things seamlessly. By leveraging an effective EMR software, you can focus on user-friendly functionality and design that comprises all the workflow of your medical staff. It will empower easy access to crucial information and streamline communication among team members.
Hence, to maximize the efficiency & authenticity of healthcare delivery, it is essential to choose an EMR system that highlights specific features for outlining information and delivering outstanding patient care. The key features should include quality improvement (QI) guidelines that align with the industry standards and best practices, a home screen that showcases the important tasks, scheduled engagements, and messages with hassle-free navigation.
All the vital information that remains in one place just a click away, easy notifications, and tracking systems. It should be easily compatible with various operating systems, Windows, and also with the Android and iOS/iPad devices. It should offer device-level security for secure & HIPAA-compliant messaging. Overall an organized interface that focuses on all patient-based tasks. It should have auto-save and auto-sync features so that there are no chances of documentation being missed or lost. Also, offer quick and easy access to documents even if internet connectivity is poor or not there totally.
The main objective is that your home healthcare agency should deploy an EMR software system that is highly secure and has an intelligent dashboard for all the patient’s details and messages empowering the medical staff to deliver personalized & quality healthcare whenever they pay a visit.
3. Back-office and agency management
An EMR software system has highly optimized patient care capabilities. Not only this, but a well-built software is efficient enough to integrate easily for financial and administrative tasks management.
Deployment of a detailed EMR system will include the following features for office operations in order to enhance overall cash flow and reduce administrative overhead costs. The features are single-patient records to avoid duplicate data entry and fragmented information, access and notify for licensing and training needs, tools for time and labor management, and effective billing and receiving.
Consider investing in an EMR software that properly organizes your home healthcare agency that is insignificant for the best in productivity as well as performance. More likely your administrative and medical staff will be grateful to you, and patients will gain special rewards.
4. Powerful reporting & analytics
Certainly, to maintain the relevancy and competitiveness of your home healthcare clinic, it is crucial for your staff, management, and executives to thoroughly go through the valuable financial statistics, patient conversion rates, and other useful data that can provide actionable insights into your clinic’s fiscal healthcare and growth.
Selecting the right EMR software system with a built-in powerful analytics platform will have a great impact and make it much easier for your home healthcare facility to manage giant business decisions. Analyzing summaries and detailed reporting in a single place will not only increase transparency and productivity among your teams but also eliminate the need for printed reports.
Hence, it highly imperative that your EMR software provider should track the key KPIs and analytics as part of its overall suite of functions such as referrals, revenue, unbilled services, case mix, aged receivables, re-hospitalization rates, trending data, insurance breakouts, and total visits in a day.
Additionally, providing resolution to issues and predicting outcomes specific to your home healthcare agency with custom reporting options is part of the EMR solution. Getting quick access to key data and analytics will result in savvy and informed management.
5. Effective financial management & billing
The key challenges faced by the health care sector are the so many nuances and verifications to account for among your patient roster, billing, and invoicing ought to remain streamlined so that your staff can seamlessly handle insurance claims and cash flow effectively.
Implementing a well-designed EMR software solution with financial billing capabilities can save plenty of time for your accounts receivable department. It will help your staff to focus on more priority tasks, reduce the margin of error, and provide the added bonus of automated tracking of a patient’s status individually.
In case you are in a mindset to deploy an overall full-suite financial performance, you need to look for the key elements in the new EMR system. There should be batch re-verification, split billing option, authorization management, expiration date alerts, all-inclusive billing, insurance claim processing, remittance, collections, audits & e-billing, room and board, and MSP billing.
EMR software offering these powerful features will improve your financial management and billing processes and boost your team productivity parallelly.
6. Patient-Driven Groupings Model (PDGM)
Last year i.e, 2020, a new payment model was introduced to the home health services sector for Medicare Part A patients. The Patient-Driven Groupings Model (PDGM) leverages changes that focus on safeguarding vulnerable patients and reduce expenses that are usually due to multiple therapy visits while determining the payment.
The significant shift in billing is a step away from volume-based care towards value-based home health services. As per Forbes research, the home healthcare sector is projected to grow for sure up to 10,000 people per day, which will be considered eligible for medicare.
Hence, it is crucial that your facility will need an EMR system that successfully meets the PGDM needs at the same time remaining flexible to future changes in-home health services sector.
About Net Health
Net Health is reuniting caregivers with their calling through cloud-based software for specialty
medical providers across the continuum of care. Net Healths interoperable EHRs deliver end-to-
end solutions that ensure compliance, improve outcomes, empower providers and inspire care.
The company serves over 14,000 facilities, including 98 percent of the largest hospital chains,
two-thirds of skilled nursing facilities and many leading hospice organizations and private
practices. Net Health is a portfolio company of The Carlyle Group, Level Equity and Silversmith
Capital Partners.
