5 Ways Mobile EHR Is Enhancing Patient Care
The usage of electronic health records (EHR) in the medical industry has gained significant momentum over recent years, particularly with the advancement of accessible technologies and innovations. An electronic health record (EHR) is similar to a patient’s paper chart, the only difference being – EHR is digitally available.
EHRs help registered professionals in the medical field access hospital records securely, easily, and in real-time. However, the use of an EHR is not limited to only collecting patient data; it is also intended to expand care perspectives.
Mobile EHR software is an advanced and mobile version of the traditional EHR that widely influences how medical practices are carried out. The factor of mobility when added to EHRs is beneficial to the clinical setting in many ways. The major impacts are listed below.
Medical Data Management
Methodically arranging health data in the digital format helps clinical professionals in making faster, informed, and better decisions while maintaining privacy and security: tools like FHIR can help medical professionals make decisions faster. Below are four ways in which the mobile EHR technology is assisting the healthcare sector:
Charting and Medical Records
A major portion of the decision-making process by a treatment provider is dependent on the patient’s previous medical data. Mobile EHR software has allowed medical professionals to access the subject case’s medical history records and create charts with the touch of a finger instead of searching through heaps of files and papers.
Digital charts and data help doctors to gain an in-depth understanding of the developments of their respective patients. Functionality such as good reporting in mobile EHR applications allows medical care providers to overview the information from a more calculated and scientific angle via a conjunction of realistic analysis and instant treatment of their respective cases.
Fast Documentation
Time is of great value for doctors and patients. A longer timeframe between the sick person needing medical care to the doctor providing care may result in small but significant information being missed out or omitted, thereby affecting the sick person’s health.
With mobile EHR apps, care providers can now take notes quickly as the patient narrates his or her experience. This step, in turn, decreases the error scope and provides additional time for other important tasks.
Data Accessibility
The ease of accessing critical patient and medical data is central to successful healthcare infrastructure. This is possible when a central database and a single data source can provide information to any authorized medical professional. Mobile EHR applications provide this feature. The data collected by mobile EHR software can be useful for estimating case’s health patterns.
Knowledgeable Staff
Since doctors, nurses, and other medical staff have to focus on many tasks simultaneously, the probability of completing larger tasks is high. They may forget about other minor activities. To address this issue, a mobile EHR app provides the alternative of automatic reporting reminders for such items as periodic tests and normative principles for laboratory results and push updates for alerts.
Communication and Connectivity
Proper communication and connectivity is known to improve participation and treatment. By building trust in the medical and healing process, it can prevent future injuries and fatalities. Mobile EHR apps are enabling improved connections and relationships between doctors and their patients:
Doctor and Patient Connectivity
In today’s age, people are more inclined towards using their smartphones for tasks that do not require doctor visits specifically. These tasks can include viewing their treatment records and medical reports and meeting virtually with a doctor if needed.
With mobile EHR apps, patients can virtually meet their doctors without having to visit them. Patients can also keep track of their doctors’ supplements and medicines by setting time alerts and reminders. Both doctors and their cases can digitally overview medical data or related information without physically reaching a particular location.
Lab and Pharmacy Connectivity
Something you certainly do not want is to juggle between different systems to confirm whether important documents such as laboratory reports and medicine lists have been obtained and reached their correct destinations or not.
And even more, you wouldn’t want to waste your time in doing the entry, copy, and pasting over and over again if the documents don’t reach due to some reasons. This practice is not only time-consuming but also vulnerable to mistakes.
Mobile EHR technology is used to diminish this by allowing you to connect the laboratory and the pharmacy. Stable links to the other users mean fewer failures and better reliability for all the individuals involved. To enable this practice, patient portals are created.
Patient portals on mobile EHRs enable instant access to prescription lists. The feature also prevents clinicians from sending out simple test results to others individually. A simple upload on the portal can do the work. This buys additional time and is also an eco-friendly option since minimal paperwork is required.
Information Sharing
Suppose the details doctors explained to patients during a visit are vaguely remembered. This means that the treatment, an understanding of the core health issue, and the patient’s awareness would be lacking, further creating misunderstandings between them.
Such an issue can happen if too many details are discussed, the sick person is under stress and pain, or there is a shortage of time. To combat this issue, a doctor can upload e-pamphlets and other instructional resources through the patient portals on the mobile EHR application.
Doctors can now share files in the form of audio, video, and helpful written content specific to their patient’s health care. This step instills a sense of responsibility in the patients, indirectly enhances engagement, and allows better health care.
Survey questionnaires built into the smartphone app assist in collecting and assessing customer satisfaction by reviews on the different fields of the medical practice.
Some kinds of mobile EHR software enable doctors to forward documents to their cases or bookmark the record to their favorites for potential uses. Hardcopies of educational materials have a higher probability of getting lost. A simple upload and save on the mobile EHR patient portal helps to securely and instantly access the document whenever and wherever required.
Diagnostics and Research Quality
Mobile EHR applications have helped improved research quality which has simultaneously improved the diagnostics accuracy rate:
Improved Diagnostics
Along with the essential instant accessibility of medical records via patient portals, visualization of symptoms through this data is also an important feature. Functionalities in mobile EHRs offer to safely capture these symptoms ranging from a skin rash to a deep wound.
The mobile EHR application in your phone would link to the system’s camera, take the captures, and then securely put up the images on the specific sick person’s medical records.
Since doctors require recent, clear, and actual images for diagnosis, comparisons, and medicine prescriptions, mobile EHRs greatly improve patient health care.
Increased Research Quality
Improved research potential helps in further finding new ways to improve patient healthcare. Data collected through mobile EHR apps help in technical advances to produce improved results via inclusion in clinical trials, demographic populations, and other such fields.
This potential enables healthcare professionals to stay updated on the latest treatment plans and disease research. Because of more analytical research methods and accurate findings, doctors are further encouraged to provide better treatment with minimal error rate. Knowledge of the research findings when shared with other medical colleagues can improve the overall medical industry.
System Workflow
On one side, the care team’s productivity needs to be increased and a higher number of incoming ill people must be scheduled. On the other side, queues of these ill people requiring medical attention should be attended to as efficiently and fast as possible. Below are the ways in which the mobile EHR software has been helpful in these scenarios:
Patient Scheduling
Assigning time to patients is stressful and timely, particularly when scheduling is face-to-face and individually. Mobile EHR apps can instead help the doctor’s staff arrange quick follow-up meetings without the unnecessary hassle of individual case scheduling.
For more ease and work efficiency, the staff can create rules, count the number of schedules, rearrange allotted timings, and more. The doctor’s staff can also overview the current plan if any emergency case comes in or an unavoidable situation arises. Doctors, in particular, should always be ready for these scenarios.
Mobile EHR applications help the medical team to provide health care to their patients within the allotted timeframes.
Billing
Delays in billing may result in delays in patients visiting the doctor. This would adversely affect not only the sick person’s health but also the doctor’s record. With the assistance of mobile EHR technology, healthcare providers can create a billing report while the case is in attendance.
This step would help to shorten the billing process and result in quicker payments. A conclusion to this point is that the sales sources remain stable so that the practice can run as smoothly as possible and enhance patient care.
Affordability
Mobile EHR technology is making the healthcare sector efficient and inexpensive for the common person. The main benefit of using the mobile EHR software is that it provides an improved outflow of care.
The mobile healthcare EHR allows more effective and reliable patient visits, minimizing redundant testing by encouraging faster reporting. Such critical features maximize saving options for doctors and hospitals and the patients with health insurance policies.
Security
Though the digital era has begun and technology is escalating by leaps and bounds, many are still hesitant to use technological innovations like the cloud. Their hesitancy is due to the fear of the unknown. Mobile EHR software connected to the cloud is more secure than the traditional EHR software mobile applications.
The best cloud-based EHR applications use more sophisticated authentication steps to ensure the solid protection and safety of patients’ medical information.
Conclusion
Technology has affected almost all global sectors: education, healthcare, travel, communication, economics, recreation, and more. However, the medical industry has witnessed one of the most groundbreaking innovations. Mobile healthcare EHR has a variety of proven advantages associated with it.
With the combination of mobile EHR technology and artificial intelligence (AI), applications like voice recognition are already being used in the clinical setting. We can expect more innovations to improve other mobile healthcare EHR, which seems a near possibility, particularly seeing how fast technology is developing and advancing.
