5 Reasons Why You Need an EHR Workflow Redesign

To successfully implement an EHR and practice management, you need to integrate your new system into your practice’s workflows. To get the most out of your EHR, you will need to optimize your workflows to take advantage of your new EHR features and functions. Here is why you need an EHR workflow redesign to improve your user experience.

What Is EHR Workflow Redesign?

A workflow is a process you use to complete a task, like documenting an office visit, checking in a patient, or making an appointment. When you implement or upgrade your EHR or EPM, you need to examine how your new system will fit into your existing workflows. A workflow redesign process helps you thoughtfully and deliberately design, monitor, and adjust your workflows to remove pain points and reduce bottlenecks.

Here are five reasons why you need an EHR workflow redesign.

#1: To Ease Roll-out

EPM or EHR implementation, or even an upgrade, is a complex project. Aside from the technical requirements, you also need to consider training, workflows, and staff readiness. If your EHR requirements conflict with longstanding workflows, staff may resist fully adopting the EHR system. To ease roll-out and prevent early hiccups from becoming permanent user dissatisfaction, you should redesign your workflows to ensure they work with your new system rather than against it.

Your EHR should work for you, not the other way around. But, simple workflow fixes, implemented upfront, can help minimize frustration for your providers and staff. A successful roll-out is vital for the long-term success of your EHR system. Paying early attention to your workflows and how they may conflict with your EHR can save you a lot of time and money down the road.

#2: To Prevent Provider and Staff Burnout

Proper configuration of your EHR and your workflows increases provider and staff satisfaction with your system. Frustration with EHR systems is a common theme in physician burnout. Providers can spend up to 49 percent of their time on EHR and desk work rather than patient care. By customizing your EHR and your workflows, you can reduce burdens on providers and staff. Well-designed workflows will free your providers to spend more time on patient care, increasing both provider and patient satisfaction.

Well-designed EHR workflows, combined with targeted, appropriate EHR training, have been proven to reduce burnout among providers. Designing your workflows to minimize burdens and maximize patient care upfront can save you from expensive and time-consuming adjustments in the future.

#3: To Maximize Efficiency

An EHR workflow redesign can help you address problem areas in your practice, improving your efficiency. The first step in workflow redesign is to identify and describe current workflows. This process illuminates gaps or roadblocks that you can minimize or eliminate with a workflow redesign. Redesigning your patient check-in workflows to use kiosks integrated with your EHR and EPM, for example, can reduce burdens on front desk staff while increasing the accuracy of patient charts. Redesigning your appointment scheduling workflow to allow patients to book appointments through a patient portal can further reduce staff burdens while increasing patient satisfaction.

Customizable tools, like EHR reports and EHR templates, can also help your practice improve efficiency when integrated into your workflows. Your NextGen EHR can be customized to help you easily track open orders, automatically transmit prescriptions to patients’ preferred pharmacies, and check for prescribing errors. Redesigning your order management and prescribing workflows to take advantage of these tools will save your practice time and money.

#4: To Get Reimbursed Quickly and Accurately

Tracking down diagnosis, procedure, and billing codes after-the-fact is time-consuming and expensive. An EHR can help you streamline coding, billing, and reimbursement, but only if you have the workflows in place to support accurate and timely data entry. With an EHR workflow redesign, you can create provider and staff workflows that ensure proper and timely visit documentation, including relevant diagnosis and procedure codes. Your EHR can even support your workflow with reminders and alerts. When your providers and staff file the proper documentation for each visit, you can get reimbursed more quickly. With a workflow redesign, you can reduce the time it takes to file claims, lower your claims denial rate, and improve your cash flow.

#5: To Minimize Paperwork and Reporting Burdens

As Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurance increase their emphasis on value over volume, reporting requirements have exploded. Your EHR and EPM can gather, process, and display the quality metrics you need to fulfill reporting requirements, but you will need to adjust your workflows to support those processes. For example, providers will often perform multiple preventive services in a single visit. A workflow redesign can help you ensure that providers and staff document each of those services. That way, you can ensure your practice gets credit for the full suite of services provided when reporting your quality measures.

EHR workflow redesign can also help you incorporate a regular review of quality metrics into your processes. With custom NextGen templates, for example, you can see your progress on all your key quality metrics in one place, helping you to identify and address gaps in care before the end of the reporting period.

How TempDev Can Help With Your EHR Workflow Redesign

TempDev consultants are NextGen experts. They can help you identify, describe, and redesign your workflows to make your practice and your NextGen EHR run smoothly. If you are implementing or upgrading your NextGen EHR and EPM, contact us to get started the right way.

Call us at 888.TEMP.DEV today or contact us here to get started on your NextGen EHR workflow redesign.