How EHRs and their data can support behavioral health practices
As healthcare practices evolve, so do their reporting and operational needs. Mining records systems can provide key guidance.
Data plays a vital role in behavioral health practices for various reasons. By collecting and analyzing data, practices can gain valuable insights into patient demographics, preferences and clinical histories.
This information helps tailor interventions to individual needs, enhancing the effectiveness of treatment plans. On the operational side, data insights help practices increase efficiencies and streamline billing, financial reporting, patient retention, referral source tracking and more.
Understanding EHR reporting basics
EHRs serve as a cornerstone of healthcare solutions and systems, streamlining data collection, access and analysis processes. By consolidating patient information into a central digital platform, EHRs provide a comprehensive view of practice operations and patient care dynamics.
Through intuitive reporting features embedded within EHR systems, clinicians can extract insights to make more informed decisions, identify improvement areas, and enhance patient care quality.
Additionally, EHRs play an important role in tracking clinical quality measures, enabling providers to monitor patient outcomes and adherence to treatments. Demographic data analysis within EHRs offers additional insights for understanding patient characteristics and tailoring services accordingly. This analysis also supports trend identification and treatment plan adjustments as necessary.
EHRs and practice management
Within practice management, EHR data serves as a tool for facilitating various crucial functions essential for operational efficiency and financial health.
Beyond its fundamental role in storing patient information, EHRs and the data they contain become instrumental in generating comprehensive financial reports, offering insights into revenue streams and optimizing workflows to enhance productivity. Moreover, the integration of EHR systems aids in maintaining compliance with regulations and upholding quality standards, ensuring that patient care remains at the forefront of operations.
As healthcare practices evolve and expand, so do their reporting and operational needs. For instance, a clinician opening a new solo practice may initially encounter minimal reporting requirements.
However, as the practice scales and incorporates additional providers, alongside growing business responsibilities, reporting capabilities become more important. Investing in technology that fulfills a practice’s current requirements and anticipates future growth can pave the way for enhanced progress.
Limitations of standard EHR reporting
Standard EHR reporting tools, while valuable, can still have drawbacks. Possible limitations include limited data accessibility, restricted access to certain data fields or extensive manual extraction processes, limiting the ability of providers to access comprehensive patient information.
Additionally, often traditional EHR reporting tools have usability issues or lack user-friendly interfaces and intuitive navigation making it more challenging for providers to extract and interpret data efficiently.
To get the most valuable data from an EHR, clinicians should ensure sufficient training is available for them and their staff. If a practice purchases new EHR software but skips the training, it will be undermining many of the benefits of getting that EHR in the first place.
Practices need to evaluate their technology solutions and their ability to capture discreet data points consistently, enabling better reporting. Many practices want the ability to customize workflows within their EHR. However, in doing so, practices lose some of their reporting capabilities because data lives in custom and free-form fields.
Using a behavioral health-specific EHR can eliminate the need for customizations because the technology already accounts for behavioral health needs straight out of the box.
Reporting features
Advanced EHR reporting features and analytics tools offer deeper insights going beyond standard reports.
Custom report creation. Providers can generate reports that offer insights into practice performance, patient outcomes and financial metrics by selecting relevant data points and parameters.
Data visualization. Visual representations of data, such as charts, graphs and dashboards, enhance the accessibility and interpretability of EHR data. Data visualization tools make it easy to identify trends, outliers and correlations so clinicians can deliver better patient care. For example, seeing a patient's health questionnaire (PHQ-9) score, an instrument used to screen diagnose, and monitor the severity of depression, over time in a graphical format in their chart can more quickly enable the clinician to understand trends or outliers to drill into and resolve vs. putting the onus on the clinician to reconcile all these data points manually. Many EHR solutions require clinicians to manually reconcile these data points, which could otherwise be streamlined through graphical representations.
Performance reporting. The ability to focus on metrics such as patient retention, insurance aging and billing documentation status goes a long way toward practice efficiency. As practices expand to accommodate more providers, it becomes more important to standardize operations. Without standardization, managing a larger practice can quickly become an unruly process.
Benefits of standardized reporting
Standardized reporting in large behavioral health practices leads to better business decisions by offering reliable data to work from. Clinicians don’t want to guess what’s working and what needs improvement at a practice. Instead, they need reliable and standardized information across all providers and locations.
Additionally, standardized reporting can help monitor important key performance indicators (KPIs) like provider productivity, behavioral health practice retention rates, revenue per current procedural terminology (CPT) code by the payer, appointments scheduled, average wait times, revenue sources and expenditure patterns and patient outcomes.
Data on these KPIs can demonstrate a lot of information about a practice. This can include which providers, treatments and patient types are realizing the best outcomes; how patients experience their time; which providers are netting the practice the most revenue; the state of the practice’s cash flow; whether they are receiving timely reimbursement, and from which payers; and so much more.
By embracing advanced EHR reporting features, practices can uncover hidden insights and make meaningful improvements in patient care delivery and practice management. Choosing the right EHR can also help a practice ensure that providers and staff have access to the data they need, when and where they need it. A customizable EHR will give practices more control over the features and functions they use most.
Ram Krishnan is CEO of Valant.