Allergy EHR Software Buyers Guide
Last updated: June 07, 2023
Allergy EHR — Quick Guide to Help Pick the Best
Have you ever compared the exciting processes of an allergy-focused practice with other medical niches? Immunology is quite unique in the way it tests, treats, and monitors patients. You have unique timelines and often patients even wait on the premises while screenings are done & results get analyzed.
Your success is closely linked to finding niche-specific solutions. And that’s what we’ll help you with below. You need an electronic medical record software package that can help you manage your unique practice better. And it’s not an average EHR program.
Determine Your Need
Firstly we’ll cover a few basic features you should consider no matter what your medical specialty is. This will optimize general functioning.
How Big is Your Practice?
This is not ‘one size fits all’ shopping. Your EHR package must match the requirements of your practice in terms of:
Size: The software must cater for the number of patients and physicians in your practice.
Type: The requirements of a solo practitioner differ from a hospital. For the first option, you’ll need basic clinical operations, but a larger entity requires certification management and multi-channel communication. You may also want to send prescriptions to specific pharmacies near a patient’s home. For larger and international projects you may need more reporting tools and even insurance management.
What Do You Need from Your Service Provider?
You can also quickly gauge whether you’re dealing with a quality service provider by looking for these features in their EHR product:
- A user-friendly interface
- Great customer support and in-depth training
- Integration with relevant software and equipment used in your practice
- 24/7 support to limit downtime
- Secure servers to protect the data you collect
When you understand the basic foundation of any EHR software you can start looking for features appropriate to the Allergy & Immunology niche.
Buy For Your Niche
You know what’s unique about your practice and your specialty. Your EHR software must help you do your usual tasks faster and easier. It’s all about streamlining your workflow and creating an integrated office.
You Need the Right Templates
You won’t find general templates useful because your work relates to very unique conditions. Your templates must mirror this, providing options related to:
- Immunotherapy
- Allergy treatments
- Vaccine history of the patient
Details relating to conditions you often treat such as:
- Asthma
- Food allergies
- Post nasal drip
- Insect sting allergy
- Immune deficiency
Because you need to know the context of the patient’s condition, questionnaires are often helpful. But why do it manually and separately from your infrastructure if your EHR can help you capture the patient’s answers?
You can do surveys before and after treatments or injections. By using your Immunology-focused software programs this information will immediately form part of your EHR data.
Ensure Easy Integration
You can’t offer quality treatment without the help of some high tech equipment and laboratory testing. For optimal healthcare, you need access to the results from these sources. Are you aware that your EHR can make it much easier to access this data?
If you pick the right Allergy EHR software, it will easily integrate with laboratory results. The data gets imported and allocated to a patient’s records so you can view it along with all other relevant information.
This makes for easy workflow when testing for allergens, monitoring drug presence, or looking for immune-deficiencies. A very complicated and time-consuming process becomes easier and faster when you use tech wisely. Of course, this also leads to faster diagnoses which often benefit your patients’ recovery times.
Dynamic Patient Treatment and Tracking
Helping your patients deal with allergies or immunotherapy is long term processes incorporating a lot of data and steps in the treatment:
- Storing the data
- Monitoring organ inflammation
- Testing allergens
- Immunomodulation
The right EHR makes it easy to track progression, access test results, and update charts. In one glance you can see how treatment evolved over time, making it easier to plot future options.
With all the information on hand, it becomes easy to make informed decisions. It’s also easier to get second opinions as you can share all relevant information with other experts by clicking a few buttons.
Accurate Codes and Reports
You can’t function optimally in today’s health landscape without using the right codes. Your EHR must be ICD-10 compliant, but more specifically you need access to the codes relevant to your niche.
In addition, you may be able to benefit more from PQRI (Physician Quality Research Institute) programs if you can submit the correct reports quickly. Today’s immunology EHR must be able to assist with this.
Relevant Information On Hand
Both you and your patients can benefit when you have access to more information. For the physician, an allergy EHR can give access to vital information on allergens, such as their causes and symptoms. This will streamline your workflow and help you make diagnoses faster.
Your patients will also appreciate access to information such as educational literature on asthma management. When they know what can trigger an attack it’s easier to avoid high-risk situations.
The benefit of having this information on your EHR program is that you don’t have to communicate everything verbally:
- Allow them to access via a patient portal
- Email literature to them
- Use visual resources as part of consultations to ensure they understand
The right EHR program becomes part of every part of your practice functioning and helps improve general tasks.
Safety Features
Your allergy software can even prevent faulty decisions by guiding you in treatment options. When you have a niche-appropriate program it will contain protocols. This will help you when it comes to choosing the most beneficial but also least risky way forward.
Conclusion
Can you see where you’ll improve in service delivery with the right tech on your side? Resources are vast making your work life easier and your services more dynamic by simply picking the right product.
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