Orthopedic EMR / EHR Software

Orthopedic EMR Software often used interchangeably with Orthopedic EHR Software is specialized medical software designed to meet the specific needs of Orthopedists, Orthopedic Surgeons, Orthopaedic or Sports Medicine providers and Orthopedic clinics by providing Orthopedic specific workflows, pre-built SOAP notes templates for common procedures which ensure easy documentation of pre and post operative care and specific content for patient evaluation, medication management, etc. It also consists of pre-built SOAP notes templates for common procedures to ensure easy documentation of pre- and post-operative care. Designed to help Orthopedists improve patient care and reduce costs, Orthopedic software systems replace paper records and manual workflows in Orthopedic practices with digital files and electronic transmissions.

Some professionals use the terms "Orthopedic EHR" and "Orthopedic EMR" interchangeably. Although they provide similar functionality, they serve different purposes. Both systems offer benefits such as:

• Reduced medical errors and improved quality of care due to instant access to accurate, updated patient information.
• More complete, legible patient charts.
• Safer, more reliable prescribing.
• Increased productivity from custom workflows and templates.

To learn more about the differences between Orthopedic EHR and Orthopedic EMR, check out our article, “Electronic Medical Records vs. Electronic Health Records - What is the Difference?”

Orthopedic medical software is comprised of the following major components:

1. Orthopedic EHR Software
2. Orthopedic Practice Management Software
3. e-Prescription
4. Telemedicine Software
5. Patient Portal

Main Features of Orthopedic Medical Software

Orthopedic Medical Software usually includes the following main features and functionality:

1. Customized workflow is critical for improving the efficiency of your practice and quality of health care delivered to your patients. Your EHR should let you fully customize the workflow in accordance with the needs of your practice.
2. Pre-built treatment plans for new and returning patients and customizable SOAP notes templates for specific Orthopedic issues like disorders of the bones, joints, ligaments, tendons, and muscles for billing purposes.
3. Includes diagnostic testing templates like arthrography, computed tomography, discography, Doppler ultrasound, dual-photon absorptiometry, dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry, electromyography, magnetic resonance imaging, muscle tests, nerve conduction study, peripheral bone density testing.
4. Orthopedic specific drug database that integrates with the provider's workflow and allows the provider to enter prescription information into a computer device – like a tablet, laptop, or desktop computer – and securely transmit the same to pharmacies using a special software program and connectivity to a transmission network. This improves productivity and empowers providers with timely and targeted information.
5. Bi-directional integration with laboratories which allows the provider to send lab orders from the Orthopedic software and automatically receive and import the results back from laboratory, radiology and other diagnostic tests into the software
6. Integrated with Comprehensive Orthopedic Practice Management Software which is probably the most low-risk and cost-effective way to make your pain management clinic more efficient and more profitable.

Adapting a generalized EHR system to your Orthopedics practice as a specialist can be time-consuming. It also usually ends up leaving you without many of the features you need to make EHR worthwhile for your practice. Get the best results from your EHR implementation or replacement efforts by considering these guidelines regarding features, pricing, hardware and software requirements and other considerations.

Here is a list of top 10 selection considerations that are important for every Orthopedic practice.

1. Select a Fully customizable EHR that puts you in control

Enjoy the flexibility of these essential features with an EHR that can be easily modified to address your clinic’s specific needs, such as:

• Customizable templates that address orthopedic issues and can be used as-is or adjusted on the fly for many procedures including trigger point injections, peripheral or selective nerve blocks, spinal cord stimulation, and many others. Procedure and surgery templates are available for both minor surgeries and complicated procedures. 
• Voice and handwriting recognition technology are on-hand to support ease and efficiency of documentation, and helps practitioners focus on patient interaction and assessment.
• Easy access anywhere any time - cloud-based technology enables access to patient records using a PC, Mac, or tablet. The only requirement is an internet connection and a standard web browser. 
• Convenient and secure e-Prescribing - enables patients to get medication refills without using a single sheet of paper – and with greater clarity and accuracy. This includes Certified ePrescription for controlled substances.  Electronic checking of drug-drug and drug-food allergies adds an extra layer of protection for the patient.
  

2. EHR Vendor must offer high quality training that eases the strain of adopting new technology

Providing comprehensive EHR training to providers and clinic staff is vital to success – helping them learn the different aspects of the system and ensuring they’re ready to jump in with both feet starting on day one. The benefits of appropriately training the users of the system include: 

• Ensuring patient safety – by helping you and your staff know where to document and find important data
• Optimizing the system’s functionality – by decreasing the frustration of learning by trial and error
• Achieving Meaningful Use incentives – by giving clinic staff the ability to navigate the different modules and ensure that all Meaningful Use-related data are captured in the documentation

Successful EHR training includes best practices such:

• Providing an in-house trainer
• Ensuring that the training is relevant and customized for your specialty

Because users have different learning styles, effective training incorporates various training modalities in the form of:

• Live in-person training
• At-the-elbow support during the go-live/implementation
• Supplemental online or computer-based training

3. Orthopedic EMR Vendor must provide top-notch implementation support

Effective end-to-end implementation includes comprehensive analysis of your needs and current processes to ensure minimal disruption. Each practice should have its own Implementation Specialist who can act as a guide and resource person throughout the implementation – from analysis to installation, testing, training, and implementation. Prior to go-live, they ensure that every device is fully connected, tested and configured for maximum efficiency and security.

Ideally, you and your staff should also have access to the following support services:

• An online Resource Center
• Unlimited technical support via phone, email, and online chat

4. Selected Orthopedic EMR Vendor demonstrates a track record of exceptional customer service support

Small and medium-sized specialty practices need to have access to customer support that understands their specific needs.  There is more to implementing or replacing your EHR than just installation.  Outstanding customer support means that providers and staff always know who to turn to when they need their answers and concerns addressed any time, day or night.

5. Chosen Orthopedic EHR is Meaningful Use Certified

Certified and compliant EHR software is a requirement for reimbursement under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). The best EHR systems for small practices automate compliance with MU regulations, thus saving you and your team time and effort and enabling you to focus more on patient care.

Orthopedic practices can be successful in value-based care reimbursement models by leveraging EHR software that:

• Streamlines the end users’ workflows
• Enables patient care coordination
• Improves patient engagement, and
• Supports health data exchange

6. Orthopedic EHR provides actionable data at your fingertips

One of the advantages of EHRs over paper is the ability to continuously collect, sort, and organize data, even outside of office hours.  At any given time, you can make a few clicks and access a “dashboard” in your EHR that displays important statistics about your patients or your practice. These reports can be about productivity, billing, and regulatory compliance. They can be customized based on your practice’s workflows and needs. 

Analytics gives providers and staff the real-time ability to:

• Track patients
• Identify trends that reflect the quality of care
• Monitor the practice’s compliance to MACRA and other reimbursement-related criteria

7.  Orthopedic EMR  Implementation must result in more satisfied patients

EHRs improve waiting and turnaround times through:

• Online booking via a Patient Portal that allows patients to select the most convenient time for them to visit the office
• Appointment reminders that help patients remember when they are supposed to get to the clinic, which increase engagement and decrease the incidence of no-shows

The right EHR solution enables providers to conduct patient consultations through real-time videoconferencing that’s both secure and HIPAA-compliant. 

These “virtual” telemedicine visits allows physicians and patients to interact and communicate in the following ways:

• discussion of symptoms
• observation/assessment of many physical signs
• collection of pertinent data
• explanation of test results
• communication of diagnoses
• discussion of treatment options
• provision of prescriptions

Telemedicine consultations are useful for simple medical issues and for providing health education.  They allow more flexibility, save travel time, and lessens “downtime” spent in waiting rooms. 

More importantly, telemedicine visits lets patients get the care they need while lowering their risk of exposure to contagious diseases during times when social distancing is necessary. 

8. Patient Data is both secure and easy to share when needed

The challenge is two-fold:

• Seamless sharing of data with other care providers
• Ensuring that sharing is done in a secure manner

Orthopedic EMR software makes it possible to do the following without worrying about security issues:

• Communicate with other facilities or providers about patient care
• Route specific records or information
• Send letters of recommendation or referral
• Bill insurance companies

The ability to use the EHR for referrals allows you to:

• Ensure that patients receives necessary follow-up care
• Prevent issues and problems from falling through the cracks when patients transitions from one care provider to another

9. Helps increase revenue capture

Orthopedic EMR that is fully integrated with the Practice Management Software increases and streamlines the efficiency of your clinic’s operations, giving you and your staff the freedom to focus on patient care and spend less time on administrative activities and tasks. 

Having this integration includes the following benefits:

• The billing process is easier and more efficient because ICD codes are assigned to each complaint within the Orthopedic EMR
• Reimbursements become faster, as encounters can be easily converted to billable EDI and paper claims.
• Built-in evaluation and management (E&M) coding improves accuracy, offering providers the assurance that the appropriate level of service has been charged.

This feature provides Orthopedic practices with a tool to confirm ICD-10 and Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes associated with the patient diagnosis, and communicate directly with the billing software to provide faster and more complete payment.

• Insurance eligibility verification is streamlined, reducing the incidence of incorrect claims and non-payments.
• End-to-end support from claim submission to payment posting and AR Management results in cost reduction, increased payments, and positive return on investment (ROI).

10. Orthopedic Software includes right features for your clinic size and is fairly priced

Small clinics often have limited budget allocated for EHR software and the associated hardware and infrastructure costs.  Because of this, they may opt for the most affordable choices.  For these practices, a cloud-based EHR that doesn’t require the purchase of expensive on-site servers and networks is the most reasonable and attractive option.

Medium sized practices with up to 10 or so providers may require EHR that can support multi-clinician access and specialty-specific EHR functionalities and tools.  They might also need reporting and analytics tools as well as more comprehensive training needs for the clinicians and their support staff.   

• Cloud-based EHRs require smaller upfront costs and are much less expensive to maintain than systems that need the installation of on-site servers.
• Hardware requirements need to be included in the budget considerations:

1. 1. Desktops – often the least expensive option and are easy to use
   2. Laptops – more portable than desktops
   3. Tablets – increasingly popular choice, as they provide screen space almost comparable to laptops, and are easier to carry.
   4. Smartphones – gaining more usage since it’s the most portable option. The much smaller screen space and battery limits pose an ongoing challenge.   

Price Considerations

• Server-based EHRs often have license, set-up, and upgrade fees that result in total costs which may be too exorbitant for most practices.
• Cloud-based EHRs usually involve only a monthly fee.
• Not all cloud-based EHRs are created or priced equally. There are other direct and indirect costs to implementing an EHR. It would be helpful to have a checklist and have a comprehensive discussion with vendors regarding these costs.
  
  

Looking to the future

Technological advances such as telehealth and telemedicine and voice recognition software are helping propel orthpaedics and sports medicine into the future. These providers have the opportunity to expand their practice beyond their immediate geographic location because they can care for patients remotely to perform numerous types of care.

Also, with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning steadily gaining ground, Orthopaedic EHR software has the potential to be even more intuitive and easier to employ while holding the promise of improving patient outcomes, lowering costs, and reducing provider burnout. Similarly, Big Data has the potential to make a positive impact on the personalization of patient care because it creates a more holistic picture of patient patterns in addition to physician efficiency and effectiveness.

Benefits of Orthopedic EMRs exist for both Orthopedic practices and their patients. Almost half of all providers give their EHR an eight out of 10 on satisfaction scores. There are five primary categories of benefits of EHR adoption that extend to both patients and providers, including:

• Improved patient treatment across the care continuum.
• Improved care coordination and faster access to records.
• Practice efficiencies and cost savings through decreased paperwork and elimination of workflow redundancies.
• Increase patient participation and transparency.
• Improved diagnostics and patient outcomes including more accurate prescribing and higher patient satisfaction scores.

Additional advantages of EHR adoption are less paperwork, fewer storage issues, and increased efficiency and productivity. Learn more about the benefits of EHRs.

Benefits of Orthopedic EMR

• Streamline patient workflow: Pharmacy orders, referrals, immediate chart completion and more make work-flow more efficient

• Customizable Templates: Most Orthopedic EHR systems come preloaded with templates for typical Orthopedic encounters. These can be further customized by individual practices to meet their unique Orthopedic EMR needs.

• Cost-savings: Significant reduction in supply costs related to medical records as well as the ability to reclaim file room space. Reduce personnel time in chart filing and pulling and finding.

• Vaccine and allergy alerts are kept current and visible reduces liability exposure

• Healthcare provider automatically drives charges through coding - eliminates delays in insurance filings, lost charges and speeds cash flow up.

However, Orthopedists have an important choice to make in switching to a Orthopedic EHR - should they buy a system that resides on their practice server or use a cloud based internet service provider, a model know as Software as a Service or SaaS.

Benefits of Orthopedic Software as a Service

• Software as a Service does not require a major investment in hardware to run your Orthopedic EHR. Notebooks, netbooks and tablets will work well with these cloud based systems. If you can connect to the Internet you can access the system.

• No ongoing costs for computer maintenance or software upgrades.

• The monthly subscription costs can be taken as a business expense the year they are incurred. Major hardware and software investments have to be capitalized and amortized over many years.

• Redundancy: Should the server in the cloud go down, there is a second and even third host that has your Orthopedic electronic health records backed up and you will be redirected flawlessly. But, if your office server goes down, you are stuck until it is fixed.

• HIPAA compliant: Orthopedic EMR SaaS transactions are encrypted and comply with HIPAA requirements.

• Instant savings come with Orthopedic electronic health records as your practice no longer needs to purchase all the paper supplies needed to maintain paper records. In addition, space devoted to record storage can be freed up and put to clinical use.

• Twenty-four/seven accessibility is possible since the portal is Internet based. You can even check or update a patient's medical record from the hospital when you make hospital rounds.

• Scalability: whether you operate a solo practice or are part of a large group practice, the cloud based Orthopedic EHR is scalable to your operation. It can also be expanded easily to accommodate new providers as they join your practice.

• SaaS systems are usually already accepted for "meaningful use."

Orthopedic EMR systems can positively impact the quality of care Orthopedists provide to their patients by improving portability, sharing, decision-making, and care coordination; getting patients involved in their care; and reducing workloads. According to HealthIT.gov, 75 percent of providers report that their EHR allows them to deliver better patient care.

Data shared in an Orthopedic EMR can assist Orthopedists in choosing the right medication for a patient with allergies and improving public health outcomes by enabling them to look more meaningfully at patient data. It also allows them to be better informed, improve relationships with multidisciplinary physician team members, procure remote access to patient charts, and more quickly and easily receive laboratory results, medication error alerts, and reminders for preventive care.

Dissatisfaction with EHRs continues to rise at an accelerated pace and has prompted physician burnout, which in turn can create more patient safety problems. Many healthcare practices are looking to make the most of their EHRs through optimization efforts, while others are starting all over with replacement systems. EHR optimization is the process of fine tuning an EHR to meet a practice’s individual needs and to improve clinical productivity and efficiency.

Although there are many factors prompting healthcare providers to optimize their EHR, each physician practice must determine if this option is right for them. A publication from the National Learning Consortium suggests that practices determine the need for optimization by addressing the following questions:  

• Are users complaining? Such complaints are often a sign of the need for new approaches to help users overcome concerns.
• Are workarounds being used? If users are leveraging workarounds instead of using the system as intended, that is often a sign of dissatisfaction.
• Is the EHR being leveraged appropriately? Adoption statistics such as user log-ins, volume of dictation, printer usage, number of handwritten forms and staff overtime could shed light on the level of EHR use.
• Are goals being met? Lack of goal achievement relative to patient safety and quality improvement often points to underlying EHR utilization issues.

Orthopedic EHR Software can positively impact the quality of care Orthopedists provide to their patients by improving portability, sharing, decision-making, and care coordination; getting patients involved in their care; and reducing workloads. According to HealthIT.gov, 75 percent of providers report that their EHR allows them to deliver better patient care.

Data shared in an EHR can assist Orthopedists in choosing the right medication for a patient with allergies and improving public health outcomes by enabling them to look more meaningfully at patient data. It also allows them to be better informed, improve relationships with multidisciplinary physician team members, procure remote access to patient charts, and more quickly and easily receive laboratory results, medication error alerts, and reminders for preventive care.