Electronic Health Records For Dummies

Reporting processes and outcomes

All of this specialized group care management means a lot more to your practice and to your patients in the long run if you can chart and report how your efforts are working for both your patients and the overall management style of your practice. Creating reports is an easy way to track your progress.

You can set up the EHR to run reports on just about anything related to group care management. You can find out the percentage of patients who show up for specific appointment types, how many patients required changes in medications over a period, what type of diagnostic imaging was most used in each group, and a host of other information.

Vendors will have reports that you won’t have to configure, but you’ll want to make sure that you’re capturing necessary information to populate the report. You can also ask how to develop your own reports. Sometimes the vendors will do this for you — it might be an extra charge or you can negotiate a certain number be done per year. Match these reports with your quality goals and any financial incentives you might have. You may even tie a bonus payment for providers to their patient outcomes.

You can count on the EHR to have the capacity to run a report for just about anything you want to know as long as the information is entered in the system. If the EHR doesn’t run a report you need, tell your vendor rep. Maybe ...