DrChrono Blog

Industry Perspectives – DrChrono Speaks on Urgent Care Needs for Mobile EHR

Posted By DrChrono, Wednesday, April 11, 2018

Mobile banking, online streaming, and even requesting rides with a touch on our mobile devices are what today’s consumers experience daily. While the rest of the world is more mobile than ever, the healthcare industry still has some catching up to do. More specifically many urgent care clinics are still stuck with the technologies of the past.

Even in today’s urgent care clinics, it’s not uncommon to see clunky old EHR systems stationary to just one location of a practice being used by multiple providers. These old-school EHR systems not only cause doctors and staff to sacrifice patient experience by having to turn their backs to patients in order to chart or input data but also add unnecessary inefficiencies due to a suboptimally integrated softwares. A modern urgent care clinic with mobility gives freedom, flexibility and productivity to everyone involved: providers can chart whenever and however they need to see the patient, staff members saves time with efficiency driven tools, and patience can experience better and faster care.

Benefits of mobility for providers

True mobility means a provider is able to walk from room to room with only a mobile device such as an iPad loaded with complete health records and comprehensive charting capabilities that allows a provider to handle anything that might happen that day. For example, using DrChrono EHR during a patient encounter allows providers to carry out all necessary patient care tasks right from their mobile EHR app on iPad or iPhone. Providers can document patient encounters, order labs and receive results, e-prescribe both regular and controlled medication or refer another provider with the touch of a button from anywhere right from their mobile devices. This saves a tremendous amount of administrative work that providers will have to do after their patient encounters. A cloud-based mobile EHR, in this case, will not only introduce mobility and flexibility to your physicians but will also enhance the patient experience.

Mobility for your staff

Introducing mobility into your urgent care practice means your staff is not tied down to a desk and can access all crucial information available at their fingertips in order to their job. In any medical clinic including urgent care, most staff members take care more than a handful tasks in a given day. Providing ways to check tasks, keep track of patients check-ins, and communicate easily with providers will not only improve practice productivity but also staff morale. Some clinics still use a traditional whiteboard to assign and keep track of tasks which can slow down your practice and be detrimental to the productivity and efficiency of your staff. Here, a cloud-based mobile EHR system with task management functionality will help you create tasks, assign them real time, and keep track of task status whether your staff members are in the exam room, at the front desk or anywhere else. Your staff then can easily communicate with providers to ensure the patient rooms are prepared and take care of all other tasks in a timely manner.

A cloud-based mobile EHR also can streamline your check-in process to create a more efficient and paperless solution for your practice and staff. Having an advanced patient solution that enables patients to check in online remotely anywhere on any device or through a mobile check-in app while in the clinic can free up a lot of staff time. This is something that you won’t get from using an old EHR system. Some high volume urgent care centers actually have started to use self check-in Kiosk on iPads in order to improve efficiency and profitability while enhancing patient experience. With DrChrono’s self check-in Kiosk functionality, these urgent care centers did not have to employ many staff members to the front desks as patients were able to independently check in on their own without waiting a long time.

Benefits of mobility for your patients

Remember the rule that you can’t make a second first impression. Your initial patient encounter is critical for higher appointment fill rates, happier patients, and happier repeat visits. For urgent care practices, patients are likely to arrive in some level of discomfort and an excessive amount of wait time does not make things easy for them. Having an online scheduling system with updated wait times (“virtual waiting room”) that patients can use on their mobile devices (or a computer at home) is a great way to take some of that discomfort away from patients. Your patients will benefit from a mobile urgent care that allows online scheduling by being able to easily find and book online appointments with urgent care providers near them on mobile or web. An online scheduling system will reduce wait times and your patient’s anxiety levels in the clinic. Now another feature to improve the patient experience is the DrChrono EHR integrated virtual queue system known as a “virtual waiting room”. It will let your patients know where they are in the queue to reduce some anxiety and provide in real time their status. True mobility means happier patients leading your urgent care to higher appointment fill rates.

Ultimately, mobility will be the factor to set your urgent care practice apart and give patients, providers, and staff a smoother and more accessible workflow. In short, if you’re looking to save time, increase revenue and modernize your urgent care you can benefit from a mobile and modern EHR system. Imagine your urgent care enabled with super speed for faster scheduling, easier check-in for your patients and your providers. All you need to have your urgent care get to this state is DrChrono EHR. A seamless mobile technology, DrChrono EHR, is here to help your physicians and staff better serve patients.

(This information has been provided by DrChrono)

Original post can be found here.