Organized and deliberate patient care involves information sharing and activities across the care team to facilitate better health outcomes. This type of care coordination takes time, effort, and planning. Care coordination enables provides to deliver safer, more effective patient care. Automating your practice’s workflow and utilizing a configurable EHR system aids in your practice’s ability to offer structure, intentional care. Let’s learn more.
What is care coordination?
Care coordination is intentionally organized patient care activities crafted to achieve desirable patient health outcomes through deliberate care and information sharing across a patient’s care team. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) provides information regarding care coordination. The agency states that coordinating care involves communicating a patient’s needs at the right time, to the right people to provide effective, appropriate, and safe care.
How EHR Systems Help with Care Coordination
When it comes to the patient journey, many patients see a multitude of care providers. This means that often views of patient care is fragmented, but it doesn’t have to be. EHR’s help to improve the following…
Data Sharing
A 2015 Edition CEHRT EMR enables your practice to share data across multiple platforms. This enable care coordination at multiple levels throughout the patient journey. Data sharing eliminates the need for faxing, lost documentation when changing practices, and clinical errors that may result from missing information. The data needed to treat the patient will be available within the system as the primary care provider, specialist, and any other member of the patient’s care team should be able to easily send and receive data. Finding the right EMR system can be the difference in providing more coordinated care for your patients and faltering along the patient journey.
Thorough Communication
Just as data can be shared across teams to ensure a more complete picture of patient’s care is delivered, so can secure messages. Patient portal solutions are typically the solution used to facilitate thorough communication streams between care teams and the patients they serve. Through this solution, a patient can directly and securely ask their provider(s) questions about treatments, receive answers, and look at chart information. Providing your patients with ways to connect with you boosts compliance, improves patient satisfaction, and impacts overall health positively for your patient base.
Improved Patient Satisfaction
Patients with access to their care teams and their healthcare information have improved satisfaction rates. Patients that are happy with their care team and practice are more likely to be compliant in their care plans. EHR systems help to facilitate this access to care that is making patients more likely to participate in their treatments.
EHR’s enable every care team member to have accurate, up-to-date information on the patient they are treating. This is crucial for the following reasons…
- For patients who are seeing multiple specialists (in multiple facilities)
- Patients receiving care in an emergency room or an urgent care facility
- For patients transitioning between different care settings
An interoperable EHR provides many positives for your practice when it comes to care coordination. It can reduce medical errors, unnecessary tests, and improve the quality of care provided by your organization.
Are you ready to learn more about MicroMD’s 2015 Edition CEHRT EMR and how this system can assist in improving care coordination at your practice? Visit us at micromd.com/marketplace or call us at 800.624.8832.
About the author,
Savanna Adams
Savanna is the Marketing Communication Specialist at MicroMD. She schedules emails to clients, prospects, and VARs, manages social media accounts, performs SEO research, writes blogs and eBooks, and much more while helping to support the simple yet powerful MicroMD solutions.
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