Top Ten Reasons Why Urology Practices Should Partner with Urology-Focused EHRs
Written by: Auren Weinberg M.D., M.B.A. and Cheryl Reifsnyder, PhD
Today’s medical practices face numerous challenges on top of the everyday issues involved in providing health care, such as rising costs, changing regulations, staffing shortages, and provider burnout. Add to these the additional issues involved in running a specialized Urology practice, and it becomes even more critical to select electronic health record (EHR) software tailored to meet Urology-specific needs. Keep reading for 10 key reasons why Urology practices will benefit from partnering with a Urology-focused EHR provider.
1. Specialized features
In the past several years, provider burnout has become an increasingly serious issue—and for many physicians, EHR technology is one of the contributing factors. However, a Urology-focused EHR is designed with a deeper understanding of Urologists’ unique needs and workflow. This means they can include features specialized for your Urology practice. Including:
- Urology-specific templates available for common urological conditions and procedures
- Templates customized to collect the information needed for specific patient groups
- Templates that can save practitioners valuable time while enhancing patient care
Using an EHR tailored to the needs of Urology practices can help combat provider burnout by supplying your team with customized tools that cover a vast range of Urology-specific conditions. This will allow them to spend more time focused on patients instead of deskwork.
2. Increased efficiency
A Urology-focused EHR system can help streamline workflows for staff and providers through their deep integration with the day-to-day practice of Urology. Veradigm delivers “smart” workflows, user-centered design, and one-click templates. Streamlined and customizable workflows improve clinical services and decrease the overall administrative burden, enabling physicians to focus more of their time on patient care.
Veradigm’s Urology-focused EHR also features “smart lists,” which track the history of what clinicians have ordered in previous treatments. Smart lists trend ordering habits used most often for specific diagnoses, considering both what the clinician typically orders and what the practice would like to encourage.
3. Improved accuracy
The use of a Urology-specific EHR can help reduce errors in documentation by providing easy-to-use, Urology-specific templates for Urological conditions and procedures such as:
- Urinary tract infection
- Infertility
- Incontinence
- Hematuria
- Renal stones
- Vasectomy
- Prostate cancer
Urology-specific templates can be customized for everything from the patient’s chief complaint to patient history to order protocols, providing an intuitive interface for recording condition-specific information. Urology-specific templates, combined with a system that integrates Urology-specific terminology, enable Urological practitioners to record error-free Subjective, Objective, Assessment, and Plan (SOAP) notes more efficiently and accurately.
4. Advanced interoperability
An EHR designed specifically for Urology can offer more seamless integration with other medical systems Urology practices, such as laboratory systems, imaging systems, and pharmacies. A powerful laboratory interface can provide physicians with options to send testing orders customized for each individual patient. Effective interfacing can also simplify data import, so patients’ test results can be automatically routed to and stored in their individual records. Veradigm’s solutions for Urology provides plug-and-play connections to your medical community, interfacing automatically with over 300 laboratories and imaging centers as well as 5,000 hospitals across the U.S.
When complete, results are delivered directly to your EHR inbox, making them quicker and easier to review.
5. Enhanced patient engagement
Enhanced patient engagement has been shown to encourage patients’ increased participation in making healthcare decisions, greater effectiveness of healthcare interventions, higher quality of care, and more cost-effective utilization of healthcare services. A Urology-specific EHR often includes built-in tools for patient communication, education, and engagement, tailored to include urology-specific information. These tools may include:
- Patient portal
- Telemedicine capabilities
- Tools for assessment of patients’ educational needs
- Tools for sharing educational resources targeting specific urological conditions
Veradigm’s FollowMyHealth® patient engagement platform integrates directly with patients’ electronic health records and your practice management solution. It can help reduce gaps in patient care with before-visit outreach communications; post-visit, FollowMyHealth enables physicians to send patients after-visit summaries, care instructions, and Urology-focused educational materials. Patients are equipped with personalized content throughout their care journey. More engaged patients can contribute to increased patient satisfaction, enhanced quality of care, and improved patient outcomes.
6. Regulatory compliance
By using an EHR system that has been customized for Urology, practices can ensure they meet all the regulatory requirements unique to the field of urology. Regulatory requirements are constantly shifting and updating for everything from coding and billing standards to privacy regulations and quality reporting. For instance, as reimbursement models steadily migrate to incorporate value-based care, it is becoming even more important for clinicians to capture detailed information on structures, processes, and outcomes. A Urology-focused EHR can enable practices to provide better patient care by providing the following:
- Integrated, customized tools to track patients’ health data over time
- Tools to facilitate urology-focused preventive care
- Integrated tools for predefined risk adjustment programs to help providers identify high-risk patients
- Integrated hierarchical condition category (HCC) alerts to ensure providers document HCC-weighted chronic conditions during face-to-face patient encounters
Veradigm EHR is certified for Promoting Interoperability (previously named Meaningful Use), MIPS, MACRA, and other regulatory programs.
7. Continuing education and training
Vendors that provide Urology-specialized EHRs are better positioned to provide continuing education and training relevant to the urology field. They better understand the challenges urologists face. This understanding enables them to offer insightful training to enhance Urologists’ usage of the EHR system in ways specifically targeting Urological needs and topics.
8. Cost and time savings
By streamlining Urology workflows, reducing administrative tasks, improving billing accuracy, and minimizing errors at every step of the process, a Urology-specific EHR can help practices save time and money in their daily operations.
Veradigm’s EHR for Urologists utilizes user-centered design to make our solution simple and quick to navigate. It includes Veradigm EHR Mobile, which provides fast, on-the-go access to some of the most in-demand features in the EHR, including rounding functionality that allows providers to track appointments for outpatient, inpatient, hospital, and other rounding lists.
Veradigm EHR has received top usability scores from the American Medical Association and KLAS.1
9. Preconfigured for integration with the American Urological Association (AUA) Quality (AQUA) Registry
The American Urological Association (AUA) created the AUA Quality (AQUA) Registry as a national Qualified Clinical Data Registry explicitly designed for urologists and other urologic care providers. The AQUA Registry enables your practice to monitor, track, and report performance for both individual providers and the overall practice. It does so to arm physicians with the information needed to advance urologic care and improve patient incomes.
Veradigm’s Urology EHR is preconfigured for one-step integration with the AQUA Registry, which meets the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ (CMS’) requirements for quality reporting as well as providing you with specific data and insights for improving your practice.
10. Improving patient health outcomes
Veradigm’s Urology EHR provides easy-to-use healthcare provider (HCP) solutions that help to drive improved patient outcomes. Customizable visit templates enable patient information to be populated with a single click based on patients’ previous visits or conditions. It supports users in defining, creating, and tracking patient-specific care plans and goals. Integrated telehealth improves patient engagement by enabling real-time video consultations using a computer or mobile device, while the mobile EHR solution enables clinicians to check their next-day schedules, review messages in their inboxes, or refill prescriptions while out of the office.
The Veradigm EHR also integrates seamlessly with Veradigm RxTruePrice™, a point-of-care solution that helps physicians improve their patients’ medication adherence by providing patient-specific discounted health plan or pharmacy benefit manager pricing, cash pricing, therapeutic alternatives, and price options at different pharmacies—all within their current e-prescribing workflow.
Veradigm®—Transforming Health, Insightfully
Over 5,000 urology practitioners in the U.S. currently utilize Veradigm solutions.2 Click here to learn more about Veradigm’s Urology-focused EHR solution—or contact us today to schedule a free, personalized demonstration and discover why so many of your peers choose Veradigm for their EHR needs.
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Internal Data on File.
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Internal Data on File, 2023.