Healthy Living

The Benefits of EMR for Mental Health Providers

EMRs and EHRs can help mental health providers improve how they provide patient care. However, these systems can only be used with proper training and support.

A top-quality psychiatry EMR can streamline clinic workflow and doctor-patient interactions, improving efficiency and reducing operational costs. In this article, we’ll discuss seven benefits you can expect from an EMR system for your mental health practice.

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Increased Efficiency

One of the most important benefits of using an EMR system is the increased efficiency it can bring to your practice. It can help you automate many of your day-to-day office procedures and give you ongoing visibility into your practice’s performance.

However, finding an EMR mental health solution that meets your unique workflows and needs is crucial. This will ensure you get the most from your investment and maximize your practice’s performance.

For example, an excellent mental health EHR should be able to meet the unique encounter documentation that providers in this field often experience. It should also automate clinical processes and decrease documentation time, allowing providers to spend more time with their patients.

Increased Accuracy

Unlike other specialties, mental health providers work uniquely and require an EHR or EMR that caters to their documentation style. It should be able to accommodate their specific type of coding, which is different from the standard CPT, ICD-10, or HIPAA codes.

Behavioral health practices implementing mental health EMR software benefit from increased documentation, coding, and billing accuracy. This is achieved by using specialty-specific features.

Specialist EHR systems also automate various accounting and financial tasks, such as insurance verification and claims. These features can significantly reduce the administrative burden on practitioners and improve practice efficiency. These systems also enable patients to view their records on demand, which increases patient engagement.

Access to Patient Records

Behavioral health and mental health providers often face challenges when accessing patient records. EMR software helps provide a solution to these issues.

Electronic health records software enables mental health providers to securely store patient records and other vital information. If a healthcare provider then decides to hire a mental health virtual assistant, they can immediately begin to work with the integrated EHR system and track patients management schedules, book appointments and put new information on file immediately. By doing this, a practice can reduce the administrative tasks expected of medical professionals, who can then focus on providing high quality care to all of their patients, which is made easier with a streamlined records system.

A mental health EHR solution should contain the following:

  • A medical staff interface.
  • Admin interface.
  • Patient record storage.
  • Terminology service.
  • Clinical decision support system.
  • Data analytics module.
  • E-prescribing module.

It should also include integrations with RCM, HIE, CRM, and a patient portal.

Enhanced Communication with Other Providers

The benefits of EMR for mental health providers include a comprehensive record of their patient’s treatment, which can be shared with other healthcare providers to help coordinate care. The electronic medical records are also interoperable, allowing information to move with the patient to labs, specialists, imaging centers, and emergency rooms locally and nationally.

Communicating rapidly with other providers increases care coordination and reduces duplicative testing. This is especially helpful when patients have complex health issues or require multiple tests or medications.

However, EMR use can also interfere with real-time communication between physicians and their patients. For instance, they may be distracted by searching for information and forget to discuss treatment plans with patients.

Improved Prescription Process

Medications are essential to mental health treatment, and many patients have difficulty understanding or managing their medications. A robust Behavioral Health EMR can help providers track a patient’s medications and ensure they are correctly prescribed and are monitored for side effects, reactions, and other factors that can interfere with recovery and lead to medical errors.

EMRs with point-of-care (POC) prescribing capabilities can reduce the number of pharmacy calls to the physician’s office and improve formulary adherence by communicating benefit information before prescription writing. This can reduce calls from pharmacies to the physicians’ offices and prevent illegible prescriptions, thereby enhancing the quality of care for patients.