The Benefits and Challenges of EHR Scalability
When your practice experiences growth, you may need to review how your systems can scale to your changing needs, now and into the future. At some practices, the demands of growth may leave physicians and their staffs assessing the suitability of their electronic health records (EHR). That’s because managing a clinic with a hundred patients can be very different from managing one with several thousand patients.
It’s vital to sustainable growth that you discover and address the challenges and advantages of scalability in health information systems. By empowering your practice with an EHR that can respond to demand, you can foster an environment where it’s easier to keep the focus on patient care, no matter how many patients you gain.
At ModMed®, our award-winning, specialty-specific EMA® EHR can help support enterprise-level practices with intuitive workflows, automations and interoperability. Explore the advantages of EHR scalability for your growing practice now to learn more about the features you need.
What Is EHR Scalability in Healthcare Information Systems?
EHR scalability refers to your EHR’s ability to expand in step with your practice’s growth. When you’re dealing with changes like a growing patient population or newly opened offices, you want the transition to be as seamless as possible.
In some cases, there may be certain efforts you’ll take that are unique to your expansion. For instance, you may need to digitize records if you’re merging documentation from an acquired practice. With ModMed, data conversion tools facilitate records transfer. If you have paper records, our scanning solutions can help get the information into your live EHR environment for you.
Another example may be that if your data sets become far larger, you would need to adjust your analytics benchmarks to accommodate a transition period. You wouldn’t just accept a month-over-month spike in accounts receivable at face value, for example. You’d validate it within the context of your specific practice management initiatives to ensure your growth is on target. With ModMed’s native data visualizations, you can delve more deeply to form insights at scale.
Ultimately, you want to use your EHR to do more without having to invest additional time on new configurations or integrations. ModMed’s scalable EHR system has the features and architecture you need to help support practice growth.
- With specialty-specific workflows, you don’t have to worry about building templates, scrolling through irrelevant options or losing computing power and speed to features you don’t need.
- A comprehensive software solution allows you to work seamlessly across objectives. Centralization puts you in greater control of patient care, engagement and revenue cycles. By working within a single platform like EMA, you can connect more easily with your specialty’s larger healthcare ecosystem.
- Personalization helps ease workflows for individual physicians, advanced practice providers and other staff. EMA can do things like remember your laser settings or anesthesia preferences and use the information to build intelligence to populate data or suggest treatment plans.
Multiplied across additional providers and staff, these built-in features can help your practice scale without having to dedicate heavy time or resources.
Benefits of a Scalable EHR System
As your practice expands, the benefits of a scalable EHR system can continue to support growth. With software that empowers agility, you can onboard new patients, physicians and other staff, increase patient engagement efforts, and maintain focus on the human elements of patient care. Cloud hosting allows access from anywhere and easier compliance and performance updates.
Give all patients the attention they deserve. As your practice grows to serve more patients, you can help keep the quality of your care high by reducing documentation burdens and automating workflows in your EHR.
Attract and retain new physicians or advanced practice providers to meet growing demand. With scalable technology to help make their jobs easier, you may find candidates want to work with you over your competition.
Enable patients to participate in their own care. Scalable patient portals, self-scheduling features and automated communication let you engage with higher numbers of patients. You can increase your practice’s reach without overburdening staff or greatly increasing your administrative payroll.
Take advantage of cloud-based hosting. With cloud-based software, you can provide your practice with features that are crucial for scalability, like access to large amounts of information from anywhere, lower investments in hardware procurement, maintenance and upgrades, and automatic compliance and performance updates. Built-in redundancies, automatic backup and resilient storage help protect data as your practice grows.
Challenges of Scaling Your EHR
Realizing the benefits of a scalable EHR can be fairly straightforward when you choose a solution that is built to grow with your practice. You can help ensure your practice sidesteps the challenges of scalability as much as possible by choosing an EHR that can address the needs of large and enterprise-level practices.
- Prioritize cloud-first technology that is designed to handle massive amounts of data without compromising uptime, accessibility or speed. EMA is cloud-based, so you don’t have to invest in on-premise servers to grow.
- Focus on interoperability to streamline your operations, administrative tasks and connectivity with third parties. A common challenge to scalability is the fragmentation of multiple features across multiple vendors or systems. With EMA, a broad API library helps large practices integrate solutions while avoiding the risks of disjointed workflows.
- Explore how user experience and layout features impact your practice’s ability to stay streamlined through periods of change. User-centered design principles keep workflows focused on your specialty. That means ModMed lets you find and work with data for thousands of patients without wasting time and mental energy on extra clicks or taps that don’t apply to your practice. Each step in our EHR is built to support precision and efficiency, from individual work shifts all the way up to multiple national practice locations.
Check Out ModMed’s EHR Products
Learn more about how ModMed’s EHR can scale to support the needs of large and growing practices when you book a demo. With cloud-first technology designed for doctors by doctors, our specialty-specific solutions can empower you to take on more patients, expand into new markets, improve patient engagement and keep track of your revenue cycle.
By placing doctors and patients at the center of care through an intelligent, specialty-specific cloud platform, you can reap the benefits of a scalable EHR system and support your practice’s potential for growth.
Request a demo to see how EHR scalability can support your growth.
This blog is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal or medical advice. Please consult with your legal counsel and other qualified advisors to ensure compliance with applicable laws, regulations and standards.
