The ROI of Investing in Custom EHR Development

Unless and until you’re a non-profit organization, everything comes down to money, don’t you agree?

This has been the case with the healthcare industry lately, as the digital transformation is demanding for significant investment from all sides. Though off-the-shelf software solutions have appeared to be an economical solution, its inability to meet the specific demands of healthcare practices have given rise to a new trend of custom healthcare software solutions.

In these custom healthcare IT solutions, EHR software development is the most in demand. This is because of the evolving nature of electronic health records. Today, EHR software systems have become the epicenter of healthcare practices, serving as a one-stop solution for both clinical and administrative purposes.

However, the cost for custom EHR software development is high, and that has become a pivotal point for healthcare organizations not going ahead with the approach of personalized electronic health records.

But what if I said that the ROI of custom EHR development can enhance the financial performance of your practice and accelerate its growth?

Though this sounds a little far fetched, it can actually be a reality, if the ROI of EHR investment is calculated correctly.

On that note, let’s uncover the ROI of tailored EHR development and how it changes the face of your healthcare practice and operations.

Improved Efficiency & Productivity

While we get into the financial aspects of the ROI of EHR investment, first let’s have a look at some of the benefits of custom EHR development for your practice, and how it sets the base to give you a financial advantage.

1. Streamlined Workflows: With the success of custom EHR projects, you get to streamline your workflows to the specific practice needs and requirements. While they consume most of your staff and providers’ time, they can shift the focus on patient care activities from documentation to other administrative tasks. By reducing the burden on your staff members, custom EHR software unknowingly increases the productivity of your practice.

2. Automated Tasks: A study revealed that providers spent 34% of their time on documentation and sharing data with the care team. Now imagine all these things, from data sharing to appointment scheduling, alerts, etc., being automated. Wouldn’t it increase the productivity of your providers? Well, yes, and bringing that into the billing and coding aspects of your practice can further enhance the financial performance.

3. Enhanced Collaboration: Features like ‘Patient Portal’ and integration allow real-time communication not only between patients and providers but also between the whole care team. It basically brings the entire care team on the same page and works towards the same goal, which is to provide better and more enhanced care. This improves collaboration, leading to better patient outcomes.

Enhanced Patient Care

The goal of any healthcare practice is to provide the best possible care to their patients and get the desired outcomes. This has been one of the major reasons why many healthcare providers are choosing custom EHR development.

1. Improved Patient Outcomes: With a custom EHR development approach, you can prioritize better access to patient information to make data-backed decisions. This will not only enhance the decision-making capabilities of your healthcare practice but also directly or indirectly contribute to improving patient outcomes.

2. Enhanced Patient Experience: Personalized electronic health records with a patient portal increase the convenience of accessing patient health records. With these personalized patient portals, patients are empowered to take control of their health and proactively involve themselves in their care journey, becoming active members in decision-making.

3. Reduced Medical Errors: Did you know medical errors cost the entire healthcare industry somewhere around $42 billion? Costly, isn’t it? Well, with custom EHR software development in healthcare, medical errors can be significantly reduced if not eliminated completely. For this, clinical decision support tools and the feature of automated drug interaction checks come in handy.

Increased Revenue & Reduced Costs

Now that we’ve covered the benefits of EHR software development, let’s see how healthcare practices can enjoy the financial advantages of customizable EHR:

1. Improved Revenue Cycle Management: You can include the feature of automatic claims submission in your custom EHR, which would result in faster claims processing and setting the reimbursement plans in motion. Moreover, since this process is automated and human intervention is required for a final check, it reduces the chances of claims denials. In this way, with EHR software development, you can improve the revenue cycle for your practice.

2. Reduced Operational Costs: Since the clinical, administrative, and other workflows are streamlined, administrative costs are lower. Furthermore, if you are a small-scale practice, then it can reduce the overhead expenses, which will save a significant amount of money, reducing the overall expenditure for your practice.

3. Increased Practice Efficiency: Since your custom EHR software will function mainly on data, it will allow you to optimize your resources to their fullest extent. Furthermore, shifting the focus to patient care activities will improve staff productivity as well. This will lead to better patient satisfaction and retention rate, indirectly creating a loyal patient base for your practice.

Enhanced Security & Compliance

Custom EHR enhances patient outcomes, for sure, but with compliances with customized EHR is easier to achieve. This will not only enhance the security of your healthcare system. Here are some of the ways in which that is achieved:

1. Robust Security Measures: Data encryption and access controls are some of the best ways in which your custom EHR system can ensure the privacy and security of private patient data. However, since it is an ever-increasing process, conducting regular security audits and vulnerability assessments is necessary to ensure that your system is always secure and that no leaf is left unturned.

2. HIPAA Compliance: HIPAA regulations have proved to be one of the cornerstones in ensuring data privacy and security in EHR software development. It is not only easier to ensure compliance with customized EHR but also minimizes the risks of data breaches and fines in case a breach occurs. This can be advantageous for your practice as a significant amount can be saved with HIPAA compliance.

Long-Term Scalability & Flexibility

ROI of custom EHR implementation can be seen even in the long term, as the technological landscape shaping the healthcare industry is ever changing and adapting to those changing regulations and technology trends is easier with customized EHR approach. Furthermore, you can easily accommodate the future growth of your practice easily with little customization and other scalability features.

Having said that, the ROI of tailored EHR development can be easily felt by aligning your custom EHR with the practice’s unique needs and requirements. This gives the software the ability to evolve with the practice’s needs.

Frequently Asked Questions