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Innovative EHR features: Medical office visit note template Innovative EHR features: Medical office visit note template August 1, 2022

Electronic health records (EHRs) offer innovative solutions that benefit independent physicians and their patients when the technology is designed appropriately for the provider’s specific needs. One of the most innovative EHR features is the medical office visit note template.

EHRs are essential tools for the independent provider to track and manage each patient’s health and well-being before, during, and after the office visit. A national survey of providers ready for meaningful use indicated that:

• 94% of providers report that their EHR makes records readily available at point of care.
• 88% report that their EHR produces clinical benefits for the practice.
• 75% of providers report that their EHR allows them to deliver better patient care.

A quality EHR can help the independent provider reduce errors, improve patient safety, and support better patient outcomes. The EHR doesn’t just contain or transmit information but will also manipulate the information in ways that are beneficial for patient care. For example:

• The EHR not only keeps a record of a patient’s medications or allergies, it also automatically checks for problems whenever a new medication is prescribed and alerts the clinician to potential conflicts.
• Information gathered by a primary care provider and recorded in an EHR tells a clinician in the emergency department about a patient’s life-threatening allergy, even when the patient is unconscious.
• EHRs can expose potential safety problems when they occur, helping providers avoid more serious consequences for patients and leading to better patient outcomes.
• EHRs can help providers quickly and systematically identify and correct operational problems.

In particular, the medical office visit note template adds to the ease in which the independent provider can input and view pertinent patient information, enabling a higher level of quality care for that patient. Templates, in general, are time-saving features if they are well-designed, with the independent provider’s needs in mind. Those templates that are poorly designed or ill-conceived can actually compromise patient safety.

The innovative EHR features designed by Elation Health are different, including the medical office visit note template. The intuitive feature is designed with physicians in mind, to reduce repetitive documentation during and after the patient encounter. The Elation template also encourages consistent workflows across practice staff and providers, clearly laying out the steps and questions to be addressed each time.

Elation’s visit note template also gives the independent practice the ability to:

• Create custom templates that suit the practice’s specific needs
• Export templates across all visit note types
• Add one or multiple templates to a visit note
• Associate CPT codes and billing items
• Capture document tags to assist with reporting
• Manage templates easily within the practice workflow.

The medical office visit note template works in window where users can customize patient visit notes. The user also has the ability to create and export new templates and to edit and delete active templates. To access Elation’s visit note template management window, users can either:

• Click on the new templates icon in a Patient Chart
• Click on visit note templates link on the top left-hand side of a patient chart

Elation’s Clinical First EHR tools are centered on the physician’s ability to provide the highest quality care. Three features of the medical office visit note template make this innovative EHR feature particularly physician-friendly:

• Physicians can export more than one template into a visit note at once to allow for more time-efficient customization.
• Users can include CPT codes and billing items into Elation’s templates to streamline visit note sign off.
• Physicians have the ability to associate document tags for easier and more consistent reporting.

Elation has designed these innovative functionalities to enable the independent practice to continue providing exceptional care.