Built For Psychiatry Practices

Psychiatry medical software is comprised of the following major components:

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

1. Psychiatry 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. Psychiatric E/M HPI elements may include the following:
      • Location: Regarding mental status, location could correspond to domain (e.g., mood, thought process, perception, etc.)
      • Quality: Descriptive language (e.g., forgetful, depressed, disorganized, hallucinating)
      • Severity: Language that relates to how bad the problem is (e.g., “8 out of 10,” controlled, uncontrolled)
      • Timing: Language that relates to when symptoms are experienced, such as in certain situations or time of day
      • Duration: Onset of symptoms and how long symptoms last
      • Context: Psychosocial factors related to the problem
      • Modifying factors: What brings on or relieves the problem?
      • Associated signs and symptoms: What else is happening? (e.g., loss of functions/drives, such as appetite, weight, libido, etc.)
   3. Psychiatry 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.
   4. Bi-directional integration with laboratories which allows the provider to send lab orders from the Psychiatry software and automatically receive and import the results back from laboratory, radiology and other diagnostic tests into the software
   5. Integrated with Comprehensive Psychiatry Practice Management Software which is probably the most low-risk and cost-effective way to make your Psychiatry clinic more efficient and more profitable.

    

1. Your medical specialty has unique needs for all clinical and administrative software and services. Psychiatry specific EMR solutions are built to be flexible and scalable to meet the specific needs of Psychiatry specialty just like yours and provide several Psychiatry specific benefits in addition to the generic benefits offered by EHR solutions.

   1. Provides Psychiatry specific templates: Specialty-specific templates streamline data entry for that specialty thereby reducing the time required to fully document and encounter. For example:  anxiety, depression, delirium, mania, psychosis, eating disorders, addiction, bipolar OCD, schizophrenia, suicide etc
   2. Coordination of care: Since a patient’s mental health may also impact other areas of their health, psychiatry EHR enables the provider to share health records with other providers to ensure right patient care.
   3. Increased Revenues: Psychiatry medical software helps doctors and specialists increase practice revenues by improving charge capture, recommending procedure codes to be used on insurance claims (and avoiding down-coding) and optimizing reimbursement process.

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

2. No ongoing costs for computer maintenance or software upgrades.

3. 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.

4. Redundancy: Should the server in the cloud go down, there is a second and even third host that has your pediatric 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.

5. HIPAA compliant: Psychiatry EHR SaaS transactions are encrypted and comply with HIPAA requirements.

6. Instant savings come with Psychiatry 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.

7. 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.

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

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

1. The selected Psychiatry EHR must meet the following 10 criteria that are important to every small psychiatry practice:

   1. 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 Psychiatry issues and can be used as-is or adjusted on the fly for many procedures. New and returning patient treatment plans for common HPI complaints: anxiety, bipolar disorder; specialty scales: brief psychiatric rating scale. 
     
   • 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. Psychiatry EHR 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 Psychiatry EHR 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 Psychiatry EMR 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.

   Psychiatry 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. Psychiatry EMR 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.  Psychiatry EHR  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

   Psychiatry EHR 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

   Psychiatry EHR 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 Psychiatry EHR
   • 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 Psychiatry 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.

   • 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. Psychiatry 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.   

   Software and Hardware Considerations:

   • 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.