Maximize Your EHR Investment:
Reduce Hospital Costs with Clinical Decision Support

Healthcare costs have been rapidly rising across the world. These rising costs put significant pressure on hospitals to optimize their budgets without compromising on patient care. Further, the increasing demand for premium healthcare services, growing complexities of treatments, higher costs of drugs, and so on are also adding to these exorbitant costs. According to the American Hospital Association (AHA), global healthcare spending is projected to increase by 4.1% annually until 2026.

In response, most healthcare organizations are increasingly investing in modern technology to reduce these costs. While hospitals across the U.S. have already implemented electronic health record (EHR) systems like Epic, Oracle Cerner, or MEDITECH, there’s an increasing need to maximize the value of these systems. Many hospitals have yet to fully leverage their EHR investment to reduce costs.

In this article, we’ll explore how to reduce costs in hospitals with an EHR and the right clinical decision support tools.

How to Maximize Cost Savings with Your Existing EHR System 

EHRs are known to improve medical practice management by optimizing your existing care processes. Here are the different areas where EHR systems help healthcare organizations.

1. Centralized Patient Records

An EHR system creates a centralized database of patient records. You can store, access, and update your patient’s health information in real-time. It ensures your entire team involved in providing patient care has access to the same information. This includes having up-to-date access to accurate medical histories, lab results, imaging reports, etc. 

Centralized patient records eliminate the need to maintain paper-based files. It eliminates data silos and reduces the added administrative burden of keeping paper records. By offering patient data in a unified dashboard, the EHR system allows for better care coordination between all the healthcare professionals involved in patient care. It facilitates streamlined interdepartmental communication for better decision-making. 

It also helps you reduce the errors related to incomplete patient data, missing health-related information, and other errors. These errors could lead to misdiagnosis, delayed treatments, or wrong care prognosis. It also eliminates the need to conduct redundant tests, avoiding costly duplication of procedures.

2. Simplified Clinical Workflows

An EHR system is also well-known for its ability to simplify various clinical processes and improve overall workflow efficiency. It digitizes and automates routine processes like time-consuming manual data entry, cross-checking paper reports, searching for patient histories, accessing treatment plans, and more. Thus, helping you focus more on patient care than administrative tasks. 

For example, EHRs can automate repetitive tasks like scheduling patient appointments, documenting treatment schedules, fetching lab reports, discharging patients, and more. 

It can also assist in maximizing resource allocation in your hospital. For instance, operating rooms, diagnostic equipment, hospital beds, and other resources are used. Simplifying these workflows enables you to focus on more critical tasks related to patient care rather than being bogged down by paperwork. 

An EHR system simplifies medication management by offering features like e-prescriptions and medication tracking. This helps reduce prescription errors and improve patient safety. For example, e-prescriptions minimize mistakes related to handwritten notes. Further, appointment reminders and medication tracking ensure patients adhere to their prescribed medicine treatments. This decreases the chances of adverse drug reactions and enhances the overall quality of care. 

3. Improved Preventive Care

An EHR system enhances your ability to provide preventive care to your patients. It offers uninterrupted, real-time access to a patient’s health history. With this information, you can identify patterns and potential risk factors in your patient’s health and avoid the progression of serious health conditions. This prompt detection allows you to take action before your patient’s condition worsens, which results in more effective and less expensive treatments.  

Additionally, an EHR system can help you implement preventive care programs for your community. You can develop targeted outreach programs that encourage your community to walk in for preventive screenings and vaccinations. This proactive approach will certainly help avoid preventable illnesses, improve population health, and reduce the burden on your healthcare facility.   

4. Optimized Billing and Claims Processing

Hospital billing has always been an intricate and time-intensive process. Most errors occur due to manual data entry and fragmented systems. An EHR system streamlines this process by automating various aspects of the billing and invoicing process. It ensures that all procedures, services, and medications that are provided to patients are accurately captured and added to the invoice in real-time. This reduces the likelihood of billing inaccuracies and missing charges.

Further, an EHR system can automate the entire claims process—right from initial claim submission, tracking, and final reimbursement. It ensures that the claims are submitted with accurate codes and proper documentation. This reduces the need for rework and appeals. In the case of errors, it automatically flags the potential issues by highlighting discrepancies or misinformation.  This will allow your billing team to correct them in advance and reduce the number of denied claims while speeding up the entire payment cycle. 

5. Reduced Staff Workload and Burnout

Lastly, and likely most importantly, an EHR system reduces the administrative burden and workload that significantly leads to staff burnout in hospitals. It automates mundane and time-consuming tasks like data entry, appointment scheduling, documentation, and more. This enables your team to dedicate more attention to patient care and less to non-clinical responsibilities. 

For instance, nurses can easily access patient information to check their medication schedules without needing to consult doctors for updates. The tool can automatically send them a medication reminder notification to ensure they do not miss this essential task. This reduces the need for constant manual tracking and reduces unnecessary interruptions while delivering patient care.

By minimizing the amount of manual work, you can better allocate your staff resources. They no longer have to work for extended hours and be victims of mental exhaustion at the end of their work days. 

Maximize the Value of Your EHR Investment with CareGauge

Most hospitals are already investing in EHR systems to streamline patient care and operations. And while these systems continue to advance, they are often not designed with end user clinicians in mind. One of the best ways to further enhance the value of these systems is by integrating Clinical Decision Support (CDS) tools in your EHR system.

CDS software offers you valuable clinical insights regarding your patients to enhance your decision-making process in real-time. By thoroughly analyzing patient data, cost data, claims data, and more, you can identify potential health risks and recommend appropriate treatment plans to prevent costly medical errors.

Integrating CDS software like CareGauge into your existing EHR system offers you data-driven recommendations and diagnostic guidance for making informed clinical decisions confidently. Its advanced analytics help you reduce the risks of treatment errors, minimize unnecessary procedures, and adopt more accurate treatment plans – all contributing to cost savings. Due to its real-time hospital data access, you can rest assured that your clinical decisions are always guided by local benchmarks, ensuring top-notch patient care. 

Moreover, CareGauge integrates into your existing EHR without any additional training or system overhauls. 

With CareGauge, you can unlock the full potential of your EHR investment. Thus driving financial savings and better clinical outcomes.

Schedule a customized demo to learn how you can enhance your EHR system with CareGauge.

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