9 Unique Must-Have Features for Urgent Care EHRs
Posted by 1st Providers Choice on
As part of the urgent care industry, it is crucial to prioritize your practice’s innovation to stay competitive. The growing demand, competition, and technological advancements are also leading to changes in certain industries.
Your urgent care facilities play a significant role in the healthcare market. Therefore, one of the questions you must answer is how to choose an electronic medical record (EMR) for your urgent care practice.
9 Unique Must-Have Features for Urgent Care EHRs
Choosing an electronic health record (EHR) for your urgent care center can be challenging due to the wide variety of options available. Numerous vendors claim to offer ambulatory EMRs suitable for urgent care, but urgent care is a unique setting that requires unique technology.
To ensure you don’t invest in the wrong tools, here are nine features your urgent care EMR must have:
1. Patient Self-Booking System
An online patient self-booking system that allows patients to schedule their healthcare appointments anytime, even if the urgent care clinic is closed. The self-scheduling feature for your urgent care EHR is convenient for patients and saves healthcare organizations considerable time and resources.
2. Efficient Walk-in IMS OnArrival Check-in
Urgent care facilities offer patients the convince of efficient walk-in appointments and being seen on the same day. Urgent Care walk-in appointments allow patients to check into the client with minimal effort using IMS OnArrival. Patients can easily enter their information quickly and accurately.
With a manual check-in process using paper, your practice could suffer — leading to overworked front desk staff and unhappy patients who might not feel comfortable having their personal information on accessible paper. Additionally, paper intake forms are inefficient and prone to errors. This could result in billing issues and medical discrepancies. That’s why you need an IMS OnArrival easy-to-use app that enables patients to check in on clinic tablets themselves. It will help shorten wait times and free up your front desk for other tasks, making it a perfect feature for your urgent care EMR.
3. Urgent Care Patient Portal
A patient portal allows patients to access a larger scale of their health records. Almost 90 percent of healthcare facilities offer patient portals. In addition, both physicians and patients benefit from it. Patients can send messages, view their test results, and schedule appointments. As a result, urgent care providers can save time and money and promote patient engagement.
4. Interfacing and Interoperability
An EMR is a central database for all patient data. Thus, it must be capable of bidirectionally transferring data to labs, pharmacies, and radiology centers. A system interface should be in place for this. Moreover, the system should interface with your EMR system and must record changes like patient information, address changes, and similar updates. With this at hand, tracking patients and their real-time information will be easier.
Meanwhile, interoperability is another feature that requires efficacy and simplicity. This function helps medical practitioners and employees better understand how data exchange takes place on three levels – functional, structural, and semantic. As a result, there would be greater patient engagement and satisfaction.
5. Lab Integration System
Get diagnostic/lab ordering integrated into your urgent care EHR software. This system will enable you to provide 24/7 care and make better clinical decisions to improve patient health outcomes.
With this feature, you can easily order lab tests while charting quickly, and the lab results appear directly in the patient’s chart. Lab ordering capabilities integrated into EHR software allow you to:
- Notify providers of abnormal lab results.
- Check your organization’s ability to deal with incoming lab results.
- Find out which patients have unusual lab results and ensure they receive follow-up care.
- Having lab results readily available will allow your organization to order fewer tests.
- Provide lab tests electronically, improving the quality of care.
- Meets Meaningful Use requirements by transferring lab orders electronically.
6. Practice Management Software
Practice management (PM) software refers to the decisions, actions, and resources you need to manage your practice on a daily basis.
Benefits of PM software for your urgent care practice:
- PM software simplifies resubmitting insurance claims for the billing team and other staff. This process saves time and boosts cash flow.
- The software allows physicians to confirm patient diagnoses with an insurer before ordering the procedure. Furthermore, PM software will enable physicians to focus on their patients by streamlining administrative functions.
- PM software allows for easy search of EHR records because it maintains documents and data online.
- PM software simplifies explaining explanatory benefits to patients uncertain about their insurance coverage. With the software, receptionists can verify insurance eligibility and inform patients if they owe a balance.
7. E-Prescribing System
As an urgent care provider, you encounter many patients every day, making it difficult for you to track prescriptions for each patient. That’s why a good EHR for urgent care should include an electronic prescribing function. It is the process that consists of creating and sending prescription orders electronically during and after the patient encounter. With this, physicians and other medical practitioners can send prescriptions directly to pharmacies from the point of care.
Because there is no handwriting for the pharmacist to interpret or prescriptions to call in, e-prescribing improves accuracy, safety, and quality of care.
8. Customizable Templates and Forms
An EHR for urgent care practices must have customizable templates and forms. With these features, urgent care specialists can tailor their documenting process to specific workflows or patients. If a template isn’t flexible enough, it can compromise patient data integrity.
Thus, a treating physician can chart and record every detail in a way that is data-integrity-safe and useful in the future.
The customizable forms simplify the process of applying SOAP notes to patient records (through clicks or keyboard commands), automating the entry of redundant narratives and enabling providers to enter only the specific variable data elements pertinent to that patient. With it, you spend less time typing and clicking and can focus on the patient.
9. Medication Tracking
An EMR with medication-tracking functionality allows organizations to track medical prescriptions and data. As a result, practitioners can analyze patients’ medications anytime and suggest alternative options if allergic reactions occur. Since 24/7 and emergency care are your top priorities, this functionality is vital for urgent care EHRs.
What Is the Best EMR for Urgent Care?
The best EMR for your urgent care center is the one that offers features that will help you provide the best possible care and service. Our 1st Providers Choice Urgent Care EMR System, for instance, provides a suite of EMR software features such as those listed above that can make your practice more profitable and improve health care delivery to patients.
Instead of selecting a one-size-fits-all EMR system, we customize an EMR specifically for your practice. Get your Urgent Care EHR TODAY!
Providing You With the Best
1st Providers Choice is a leading provider of the best EMR and EHR software solutions for medical facilities. We offer various EHR features. Choose only the best for your healthcare practice!
We also understand the need and expectations of our clients for a higher level of performance for billing software and EMR software. That’s why we only offer the top-tailored medical billing system and the best EHR features that will allow your practice to operate at its optimum potential, save time, and double your revenue.
You can call us at (480) 782-1116 for immediate assistance, or you can schedule a free demo with our experts TODAY.