Medical Practice Efficiencies & Cost Savings
Health IT improves medical practice efficiencies and achieves cost savings by streamlining operations, reducing administrative burdens, and optimizing resource allocation, thereby enabling providers to deliver high-quality patient care.
Electronic Health Records Add Medical Practice Efficiencies and Savings
Many healthcare providers have found that electronic health records (EHRs) help improve medical practice management by increasing practice efficiencies and cost savings. EHRs benefit medical practices in a variety of ways, including:
- Reduced transcription costs
- Reduced chart pull, storage, and re-filing costs
- Improved documentation and automated coding capabilities
- Reduced medical errors through better access to patient data and error prevention alerts
- Improved patient health/quality of care through better disease management and patient education
EHR-enabled medical practices report:
- Improved medical practice management through integrated scheduling systems that link appointments directly to progress notes, automate coding, and managed claims
- Time savings with easier centralized chart management, condition-specific queries, and other shortcuts
- Enhanced communication with other clinicians, labs, and health plans through easy access to patient information from anywhere; tracking electronic messages to staff, other clinicians, hospitals, labs, etc.; automated formulary checks by health plans; order and receipt of lab tests and diagnostic images; and links to public health systems such as registeries and communicable disease databases.
Affect On Revenue: Automating Clinical Documentation and Orders
- Enhanced ability to meet regulatory reporting requirements (such as those under the Merit-based Incentive Payment System, or MIPS) through clinical decision support alerts that prompt providers to document key quality data.
- Reduction of time and resources needed for manual charge entry resulting in more accurate billing and reduction in lost charges
- Decrease in charge lag days and vendor/insurance denials associated with late filing
- Integration of charge review edits alerting physicians if a test can be performed only at a certain frequency
- Automated prompts to obtain Advance Beneficiary Notices (ABNs) when appropriate, helping avoid denied Medicare claims due to lack of patient notification
Additional Benefits
EHRs Reduce Paperwork
EHRs can reduce the amount of time providers spend doing paperwork.
Administrative tasks, such as filling out forms and processing billing requests, represent a significant percentage of health care costs. EHRs can increase practice efficiencies by streamlining these tasks, significantly decreasing costs.
In addition, EHRs can deliver more information in additional directions. EHRs can be programmed for easy or even automatic delivery of information that needs to be shared with public health agencies or for the purpose of quality measurement.
Electronic Prescribing (E-Prescribing)
Paper prescriptions can get lost or misread. An e-prescribing system can save lives (by reducing medication errors and checking for drug interactions), lower costs, and improve care. Thanks to federal policy, federal incentives, and state-level action, most prescribers today have e-prescribing capability integrated in EHRs, and virtually all pharmacies can accept e-prescriptions.
The HTI-4 final rule updated the electronic prescribing certification criterion that supports the availability of certified health IT to enable the exchange of prescription information among prescribers, pharmacies, intermediaries, and payers.
EHRs Reduce Duplication of Testing
Because EHRs contain all of a patient’s health information in one place, it is less likely that providers will have to spend time ordering—and reviewing the results of—unnecessary or duplicate tests and medical procedures. Less utilization means fewer costs.