How to Choose an Orthopedic EHR System
Orthopedic practices like yours spend every day diagnosing and treating patients. It’s what they do best. This leaves little time to diagnose themselves; to examine and improve workflow, processes and systems. And when practices do manage to put their electronic health records (EHR) system under the microscope, they often find it far easier to pinpoint problems rather than paths to improvement.
Because it’s difficult to measure your existing EHR system’s effectiveness without comparing it to other systems in the market, a baseline of industry knowledge is required to truly understand where and how you can improve. This means building an educated understanding of available features and the systems that are capable of delivering them. It’s a process that can become confusing very quickly.
To help you make the most informed decision regarding your software needs, we've developed a guide highlighting the top features of today’s most effective orthopedic EHR systems. Our Blueprint for Choosing Orthopedic Software details the must-have features that systems should provide to deliver tangible benefits; benefits that can help practices like yours run more efficiently.
Navigating the Orthopedic EHR System Marketplace
A quick bit of reassurance: If you are an orthopedic practice that is unhappy with your existing EHR system, you’re not alone. Many practices struggle with the limitations of outmoded, underperforming or poorly integrated software. But it’s not all doom and gloom.
Based on the growing number of viable EHR system options currently available in the marketplace, the opportunity to pursue meaningful workflow change has never been greater. Today’s best systems often come packaged with a full suite of powerful features. Many are designed to address the practice-specific needs of healthcare professionals with specialized areas of focus like orthopedics.
Unfortunately, a large part of the challenge in finding the right system is the abundance of choice. The marketplace is crowded, can be a bit of a minefield and attempting to navigate it without a guide can lead to a great deal of unnecessary anxiety. This is why having an informed game plan is so very important.
Evaluating Orthopedic EHR System Features
Any workable game plan should start with a features comparison. The most effective EHR systems should have orthopedic-specific diagnoses, orders, billing codes and more built in. Rather than forcing you to spend weeks building out templates, the right system should already have done the work for you. Your orthopedic software should also easily adapt to your daily workflow. For example, systems should remember your top clinical scenarios and adapt to individual physician’s unique preferences. This allows for rapid capture of the data needed for accurate orthopedic billing while maintaining control of the output. More simply put, features tailored specifically to orthopedic practices will be better able to immediately address your needs without the burden and cost of extensive customization.
Once you’ve narrowed down desired features and the range of orthopedic EHR systems you’ll be evaluating, it’s important to do a deep dive comparison. Aside from features, pay close attention to performance, server environment and support options. Only by considering software solutions in relation to one another can you get the best picture of the one that will best serve your needs.
Modernizing Medicine® has the Answers you need
Whether you’re changing orthopedic EHR systems or implementing a new one, your final choice of platform can impact everything from your bottom line to your work/life balance. You’re not just choosing software, you’re choosing the ecosystem within which your practice will operate. We created our Blueprint for Choosing Orthopedic Software because we understand that the right choice will be an informed choice.
During your system research and vetting process, you’re bound to have questions. When they arise (and they will), please keep the EHR system experts at Modernizing Medicine in mind. We have an extensive knowledge of orthopedic software because we’re the physicians that developed one of the most comprehensive orthopedic software solutions on the market.