What Information Is Stored in an EHR?

Your EHR stores far more information than paper medical records. In addition to each patient’s medical record, your EHR stores practice operational data, quality of care metrics, billing information, and revenue cycle data. If you configure your EHR properly, you can keep track of your patients, practice, and financial picture all in one place.

Here are the types of information stored in your EHR.

Your EHR Stores Patient and Clinical Information

Your practice’s EHR stores comprehensive patient information. This includes demographics, contact information, and clinical data. EHRs store complete diagnoses and procedure codes from office visits. This helps both improve patient care and ensures proper billing.

Your EHR stores test and lab orders and results. With an EHR, there is no need to file paper lab results or pull charts for appointments. The comprehensive testing and result information stored in your EHR helps reduce duplicative testing and speed diagnosis.

Your EHR also stores prescription data and medication dispensing history. With e-prescribing, you can order prescriptions in your EHR system and have them sent directly to the patient’s preferred pharmacy. This saves time for both your practice and your patients. Your EHR will also automatically check your prescription against patient allergies and known drug interactions. This prevents inadvertent prescribing errors, improving patient outcomes, and reducing your liability.

Your EHR system also stores data shared by other providers. This includes test results, diagnoses, and procedures performed by your patients’ other providers often sent through Direct Messaging and C-CDAs. Sharing data helps you coordinate care with other providers and reduce duplicative efforts. Data sharing can also improve health outcomes.

NextGen’s population health management tools can help you extrapolate from patient charts to manage the health of your overall patient population. For example, these tools let you stratify patients by risk, coordinate care for high-risk patients, and analyze the overall health of your patient population.

Your EHR Stores Quality Information

Most practices must submit quality data for Medicare, Medicaid, or private payers. Quality bonus programs can help you increase revenue for providing high-quality care to your patients. Your EHR stores everything you need to take part in quality reporting and quality payment programs.

Your EHR can help you quickly gather quality measures from across your patient population. For example, TempDev’s NextGen EHR Quality Dashboard lets you see key quality measures in real time drawn from your EHR data.

Your EHR Stores Practice Information

Your EHR system is far more than an electronic medical record (EMR). It also stores information about your practice that can help make you more efficient. When combined with a Practice Management system, your EHR system stores information about how patients flow through your office. With dashboards and reports, you can explore bottlenecks in your patient workflows. For example, your EHR and EPM system stores data about missed appointments, wait times, and visit length. You can explore this data to improve scheduling and patient through-put. 

Your EHR also stores information about your providers. Using appointment and billing data stored in your EHR, you can review codes billed and revenue generated by each of your providers. You can also review missed appointments and visit times by provider. This provider data can help you identify areas for additional training. It can also help you distribute workloads appropriately across providers or practice sites. 

Tools from third-party NextGen developers like TempDev’s can help you take advantage of the practice information stored in your EHR. Here are some of the NextGen EHR dashboards, templates, and reports TempDev has developed to help you track your practice data:

Your EHR Stores Billing and Revenue Information

Your EHR, combined with a Practice Management system, also helps you bill for appointments and procedures. The codes and documentation recorded during appointments flow directly into your billing process. Your EHR stores information about the codes billed to each payer. It also stores claims denials and revenue cycle details. Armed with this data, you can identify bottlenecks in billing and reimbursement.

Denied claims cost you time and money. Your EHR system can help you identify commonly denied claims so you can develop procedures to ensure proper documentation. With provider-level billing information, you can also identify providers and staff who may need additional training in coding and documentation.

Your EHR stores information about your revenue cycle. For example, your EHR stores the date each claim was billed, the payer, and the date payment was received. This data can help you identify payment processing problems with payers. Your EHR can also track outstanding accounts receivable from payers and patients.

TempDev has developed several reports, dashboards, and templates to help you keep track of billing and revenue in your NextGen EHR:

How TempDev Can Help You Get More out of Your EHR

TempDev’s consultants and developers are NextGen EHR experts. They can help your practice store, streamline, visualize, and report your EHR data. From data conversions to quality improvement to revenue cycle issues, TempDev has the solution you need to make your EHR work for your practice.

Call us at 888.Temp.Dev or contact us here for help to get the most out of your NextGen EHR.