Is your EHR scalable?
Empowering independent physicians to provide higher quality care with a reduced administrative burden is a large part of the scalability factor in an electronic health record (EHR) solution. Expanding a practice or shifting a delivery model should not require the provider to invest in an entirely new system. Is your EHR scalable? Do you have the technology you need to grow and succeed in today’s healthcare environment?
Scalable EHR technology within the practice is important for implementing interoperability capabilities to share patient information with other healthcare providers caring for that patient as well as for accommodating the growing use of wireless technologies by the practice’s patients. Interoperability with other systems is a significant factor in deciding to secure a scalable EHR.
Interoperability is challenging to achieve in real-world applications, especially those that do not involve direct patient care or payment. Real-time data exchange between health systems and research and public health is often inconsistent and insufficient.
On the research side, many patient-centered outcomes researchers and public health surveillance programs share a common challenge: they rely on clinical data that are frequently inaccessible and under-reported. As a result, they may be unable to answer critical questions that could lead to better, more patient-centered care–or to leverage patient-level data for public health action.
Lowering the cost of care is critical as well. Elation Health offers the scalability an independent practice needs to be successful. Providers have the ability to leverage our expertise in innovative primary care to streamline clinical workflows and drive efficient growth while delivering results for payers, employers, and patients. In addition, tech-forward organizations can use Elation’s patient experience tools or leverage our API to build your own applications for comprehensive and personalized care.
For developers, the availability of bigger and better data to build digital health tools including algorithms requires healthcare providers to invest in transforming the culture towards a shared objective of team learning that will ultimately translate into data systems that scale. Advanced hardware and software technologies will not generate dividends for population health unless the organizational culture fosters these kinds of teams which can collaborate and innovate to leverage these technologies.
Interoperability can preclude the lack of access to electronic health record (EHR) data that can impede innovative partnerships between providers and public health to advance patient outcomes. In recent years, the maturation of standards such as Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR), and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) requirements for certification of health information technology (health IT) that underpin many EHRs, such as the Common Clinical Data Set (CCDS) and open application programming interfaces (APIs), have created a health IT environment that is ripe for developing scalable and extensible solutions to overcome interoperability challenges.
When considering an EHR system for your independent practice, there are a few areas that contribute to scalability that will be important in your decision process. Cloud EHRs, for example, have a greater ability to allow a practice to scale up. Upgrading and remaining current, as well as expanding capabilities to adjust to a growing practice, can be seamlessly accomplished without major changes to the existing EHR system.
