7 Essential EHR Software Features for 2024

Electronic health records have become the center of providing care in recent years. The high adoption rates in healthcare facilities have given it the required boost to bring it to the mainstream. The EHR software features have bridged many gaps that fragmented healthcare in recent years.

Let’s delve into the recent statistics that unequivocally demonstrate the tangible benefits of EHR features for improved patient care. A study conducted by the University of Beirut Medical Center revealed that EHR integration led to a significant 48.8% reduction in medical errors. This is due to EHR software features like patient history, medication interaction checks, and assistance in clinical decision support.

From driving data-based healthcare practices to bringing transparency in care services, electronic health records have become necessary for the evolving digital healthcare landscape. With several changes coming into the picture in the form of AI in healthcare or EHR integration with other systems, you need to be careful about your EHR software features to bring efficiency to your care practices.

But how to choose an EHR system and what are the best EHR software features for 2024?

Well, here are the 7 essential EHR software features for 2024 that can help you in taking your digital healthcare practice forward.

Streamlined Workflow & Improved Efficiency

When choosing an EHR software, carefully check the features that it offers to streamline the workflow of your practice, which will help you improve the efficiency of your healthcare practice. One of the essential features of this is appointment scheduling, which helps you manage clinical appointments better. Along with that, check if it offers automated appointment reminders and customized templates that are specific to diseases and conditions to help providers manage their conditions better.

Clinical operations include prescriptions and lab orders, which make up a major part of patient care delivery. Check for such functionalities such as ePrescriptions and direct lab order integration into the EHR software features to reduce paperwork and streamline the clinical workflow of your healthcare practice.

EHR software features like appointment scheduling, reminders, customized dashboards, ePrescriptions, and lab orders streamline your clinical workflow. This helps providers to focus more on their patient care and waste their time doing repetitive, time-consuming tasks.

Enhanced Patient Engagement

Another core aspect of your care delivery that you should check for in your EHR software features is the patient engagement features. Since active patient participation is crucial for care delivery, the EHR software you are choosing for your practice should have features that empower patients, giving them more control of their health.

One of the essential EHR software features for this is a secure patient portal for providers to easily access patient’s medical records and view lab results on demand, whenever required. Along with that, the software should be able to provide secure communication channels that promote patient-provider collaboration and coordination.

Some of the EHR software features that define the functionalities of your software are appointment reminders, telehealth options and online bill payments to improve patient engagement and bring convenience to your patients.

Robust Security & Data Protection

Healthcare software solutions deal with the sensitive information of patients; that is the reason you should emphasize the EHR features for data security. The first and foremost thing that comes into play with regard to this is its compliance with HIPAA regulations, which ensures that the EHR software features prioritize the safeguarding of patient information and offer robust security features to protect patient data.

Some of the essential features in this to look for are authentication, data encryption and audit trails. These best practices for EHR integrations help you understand the robust security measures taken by the software to ensure data security and safety.

Interoperability & Data Sharing

Healthcare delivery relies heavily on collaboration and coordination between different sectors of healthcare. Especially in the digital healthcare landscape, where care services are delivered online, it is important for your EHR software to seamlessly exchange data with other healthcare systems. For your EHR software features to achieve this, the software needs to be interoperable.

By achieving interoperability, your software can easily exchange information with other healthcare systems accurately and make sense of it. Following interoperability standards like HL7 integration and open APIs to facilitate data sharing can go a long way and significantly improve coordination between healthcare providers.

Advanced Reporting & Analytics

Since electronic health records help in collecting and managing patient health data, healthcare providers need to analyze the trends in the collected data to deliver care. This is where using AI in EHR systems for reporting and analytics comes in handy to fasten care delivery. Robust reporting features like pre-built reports, customizable reports, and real-time dashboards can help providers focus on specific areas of care like chronic disease management, report generation, and trend identification in health patterns.

These EHR software features, apart from delivering care effortlessly and quickly, also help in population health management. AI in healthcare is a significant improvement, and its integration with EHR software can efficiently improve care delivery. Along with that, using AI in EHR systems would amplify the care delivery process by quickly identifying trends in care patterns and improving the quality of care with proactive interventions and other driving data-driven practices in healthcare.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Integration

As discussed above, AI in healthcare has made significant progress, and some healthcare institutes are using it to diagnose and treat patients effectively. AI in healthcare itself is one of the emerging trends. Using AI in EHR systems has many benefits, like providing clinical decision support, patient risk stratification, and automated documentation processes.

All these functionalities of your EHR software features can be enabled using AI in EHR systems. By using AI your EHR software features will directly contribute to streamlining the healthcare administrative process. This will help you in improving the efficiency of your healthcare practice and data-driven practices will help in improving accuracy of the healthcare services being provided.

Scalability & Future-proof Design

Last but not least, EHR software features that you should consider are its scalability features. Your digital practice will grow with time and from a long-term perspective, you need your software to be scalable to adapt to the growing needs of your practice. From helping you manage a high patient population to data, if your EHR software features are not scalable, then it will not accommodate your needs, leading to disruptions and latency in care delivery.

The best EHR software features for 2024 with respect to scalability and future-proofing your software are cloud-based deployment, flexible user access, and regular software updates to ensure that the system is up-to-date and does not lag behind in adopting the latest trends and technologies available in the market.

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