Regardless of the type of healthcare facility you work in, computer software plays a vital role in running the business effectively. During the past decade, multiple software companies became popular and offered the potential to manage healthcare business operations with their products. Of these products, Electronic Health Records (EHR) and Practice Management Software have become the most commonly used.
What Is EHR Management Software?
EHR management software was designed to be a single place to store patients’ medical information. This includes elements such as chart notes, allergy information, test information, diagnosis information and patient histories.
The overall purpose of incorporating EHR in your healthcare practice is to greatly reduce errors and improve efficiency. Accuracy in treating patients has the ability to be greatly increased when using EHR in your practice.
Benefits of EHR include:
- Enhanced patient care
- Significant patient-centered benefits of EHR include:
- Increase in patient participation in their own care
- Better coordination of care
- Improved diagnostics
- Increase in efficiency
- Decrease in costs
What Is Medical Practice Management Software?
Medical practice management software is designed to address the business office needs of a typical healthcare practice. Examples of the types of tasks covered by practice management software include patient appointments scheduling, insurance verification and billing management.
Benefits associated with practice management software include:
- Faster payments
- Quicker reimbursements
- Easily updated and accessible records
- Automation of most tasks
Does Your Company Need EHR or Practice Management Software?
EHR and practice management software are designed to perform very different tasks. Whereas EHR is focused on patient information, practice management software is focused towards managing your staff. Both perform very important tasks that are designed to improve the functionality, effectiveness and accuracy of your practice.
Which one should you use for your healthcare office? Ideally, your healthcare practice would use both EHR and practice management software. By incorporating both, you stand to greatly increase the productivity of your staff and reduce frustration when it comes to providing patient-centered care.
