Why Pediatricians Need a Purpose-built EHR
Caring for children is a unique calling, filled with distinct challenges and immense rewards. Your practice is a dynamic environment centered on growth, development, and family. So why would you use a generic electronic health record (EHR) system designed for adults?
A purpose-built pediatric EHR empowers your practice to deliver exceptional care by aligning technology directly with the needs of your young patients and your specialized workflows.
Using a one-size-fits-all EHR is like trying to measure a newborn’s weight on a truck scale—it’s the wrong tool for the job. It creates inefficiencies, increases the risk of errors, and forces your team to develop cumbersome workarounds.
The right technology can transform your practice, allowing you to focus less on administrative burdens and more on what truly matters: the health and well-being of children. This is where an EHR built for pediatric care makes all the difference.
Key Takeaways
- Generic EHRs fall short because they aren’t designed for pediatric-specific workflows, such as growth tracking, complex immunization schedules, and family-based communication.
- A true pediatric EHR is built from the ground up with pediatric workflows, templates, and data fields at its core.
- Essential features include integrated growth charts, immunization forecasting, weight-based dosing calculators, and a robust parent portal.
- The right EHR improves clinical accuracy, saves significant time, reduces administrative workload, and enhances communication between providers and families.
Understanding the Unique Needs of Pediatric Practices
Pediatric care differs significantly from adult medicine. Kids aren’t just little grown-ups—their bodies, developmental stages, and healthcare needs are constantly evolving.
Pediatricians use an EHR to track these unique milestones and ever-changing health needs, including recording diagnostic and medication data, accessing lab results, storing patient demographics, documenting clinical notes, and checking compliance with screening tests and immunizations.
Yet, a standard EHR often fails to capture these specialty needs and their associated complexities.
For instance, pediatric care is built around tracking growth and development. You meticulously monitor height, weight, and head circumference, comparing them against established percentile curves. General EHRs often lack integrated, visually intuitive growth chart integration, forcing you to use external tools or bulky modules.
Immunizations are another cornerstone of your practice. Managing complex vaccine schedules, forecasting due dates, and reporting to state registries is a significant task. An effective pediatric EHR software automates this with built-in immunization tracking in EHR, flagging overdue vaccines and simplifying compliance.
Finally, your workflow is unique. You navigate frequent well-child visits, manage endless school and camp forms, and communicate not just with the patient, but with parents, guardians, and sometimes multiple family members. A generic EHR struggles with these family-centric dynamics and the high volume of preventative care visits, creating workflow issues and bottlenecks.
RELATED CONTENT: How Healthcare Software Optimizes Shot Schedules and Increases Vaccination Availability
What Makes an EHR “Purpose-Built” for Pediatricians
A purpose-built system is designed from the ground up with your practice in mind. It’s more than just a general EHR with a few pediatric templates slapped on. “Purpose-built” means pediatric workflows shape the software’s core architecture.
This design includes:
- Intuitive charting: Templates and medical forms are specifically designed for well-child exams, sick visits, and developmental screenings, letting you document visits quickly and thoroughly.
- Flexible visit types: The system easily accommodates different appointment types, from newborn checks and sports physicals to behavioral health consultations.
- Developmental milestone tracking: Integrated tools allow you to seamlessly track and document milestones, making it easier to spot potential delays early.
When your EHR is tailored to your specialty, it enhances every aspect of your work. It improves diagnostic accuracy by presenting relevant data clearly, ensures compliance with pediatric-specific guidelines, and ultimately elevates the quality of care for your youngest patients.
Essential Pediatric EHR Features to Consider
When evaluating a pediatric EHR system, certain features are non-negotiable. These tools are specifically designed to address the daily realities of a pediatric practice.
- Growth chart tracking: Look for systems that include the World Health Organization (WHO) and Centers for Disease Control (CDC) growth charts, with automatic percentile calculations and clear visual displays to share with parents.
- Immunization management: The system should feature built-in CDC schedules, vaccine forecasting, inventory management, and automated reporting to state registries, such as the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
- Pediatric dosing calculators: To ensure patient safety, a built-in, weight-based dosing calculator is crucial for accurately prescribing medications.
- Parent/guardian portal and family linking: The EHR should allow you to link siblings under one parent account and provide secure portal access for parents to view records, schedule appointments, and communicate with your office.
- Customizable templates: You need specific templates for well-child visits, sick visits, developmental screenings (such as MCHAT or ASQ), and other common pediatric encounters to streamline documentation.
- Pediatric telehealth integration: A seamless pediatric telehealth integration allows you to conduct virtual visits for consultations, follow-ups, and triage, offering convenience for busy families.
- Robust billing and coding: The software must support pediatric-specific billing codes for immunizations, developmental screenings, and preventative care to ensure accurate reimbursement.
How a Pediatric-focused EHR Improves Care Delivery
Adopting an EHR for pediatricians that is truly fit-for-purpose yields significant improvements across the practice.
Greater Personalization and Accuracy
An EHR for pediatricians enables better, more personalized care. With all relevant information—from growth trends to immunization histories—readily available, you can make more informed clinical decisions. This continuity of care is vital for tracking a child’s health over a two-decade period.
It also enhances data accuracy. Automated calculations and integrated data entry fields minimize the manual input errors commonly associated with generic systems.
Saves Time
With pediatric-specific templates and automated workflows, physicians and staff spend less time on administrative tasks and more time engaging with patients.
For example, the fully integrated DrChrono Family Medicine EHR offers customizable medical templates that aw you to tailor your charting workflow to the needs of your practice. You can start with medical templates from our library and edit them, or you can build your own from scratch.
Better Communication
Finally, a pediatric-focused EHR improves communication. A unified platform with a patient portal keeps providers, staff, and families connected and informed. For example, the DrChrono Family Medicine EHR offers a HIPAA-compliant OnPatient Portal.
Through this portal, patients and their families can:
- Safely and conveniently communicate with providers
- Conduct video visits from their iOS device
- Pay bills online
- Sign consent forms and fill out other intake forms before they even step into the office
- Access treatment plans, educational materials, and more
Pediatricians can:
- Check-in patients paperlessly with digital consent forms on iPad kiosks or have patients check in through the portal at home
- Automatically send appointment reminders, vaccination schedules, and wellness visit reminders
- Verify insurance in real time
Compliance, Data Security, and Reporting in Pediatric EHRs
Protecting patient data is vital, and pediatrics has unique privacy considerations. A quality pediatric EHR is designed with this in mind. It ensures HIPAA compliance while managing child-specific consent rules, such as those related to adolescent privacy and parental access.
For example, the HIPAA Privacy Rule generally allows personal representatives to see a young person’s medical records.
- A personal representative is a parent, guardian, or person who has legal authority to make healthcare decisions.
- For emancipated minors, it is a person with legal authority to make healthcare decisions.
However, there are exceptions such as:
- The young person’s care is court-ordered
- The young person’s personal representative agrees that the provider and the young person have a confidential relationship
Furthermore, a purpose-built system automates reporting for immunization registries, public health agencies, and quality-of-care metric programs, such as VFC (Vaccines for Children). This automation not only ensures compliance but also frees up valuable time for you and your staff.
Real-world Benefits: A Look at Pediatric EHR Impact
Practices that switch to a pediatric-focused EHR consistently report transformative results. For example, one study found that automated text message reminders significantly improve pediatric vaccination rates compared to a control group without this technology.
Another study found that automated reminder messaging delivered via EHR patient portals increased the rates of scheduling and completing well-child care (WCC) visits, as well as receiving the COVID-19 vaccine.
A study by one pediatric group found that using an automated charting system saved approximately 2.8 minutes in documentation time per appointment, averaging to about 1.5 hours saved per provider each week.
Overall, the evidence shows that adopting a pediatric-focused EHR not only enhances patient outcomes but also makes the daily workflow more efficient for providers. By reducing administrative tasks and improving communication, these systems help ensure children receive the timely care they need.
How to Choose the Right EHR for Your Pediatric Practice
Selecting the best EHR for pediatric practices requires careful evaluation. Here are four key criteria to consider:
-
Ask the right questions: When speaking with vendors, ask specifically how their system handles vaccine lot management, family-based billing, and adolescent privacy. Does it offer whole-family features for better staff coordination as well as a secure messaging portal for easy communication and record sharing?
-
Prioritize customization and integration: Can you customize templates to fit your unique workflow? For example, does it offer pre-built yet customizable pediatric workflows for operational efficiency, from growth charts to vaccine codes. Does the EHR integrate with your billing service, state immunization registry, and diagnostic labs?
-
Request a pediatric-specific demo: Insist on a demonstration that walks through a typical well-child visit, a sick visit, and the administration of multiple vaccines.
-
Seek user feedback: Talk to other pediatricians who use the software. Ask them about the implementation process, customer support, and how the system performs in a real-world clinical setting.
The Future of Pediatric EHR Technology
The evolution of pediatric practice management and clinical software is pointing toward an even more intelligent and integrated future. One study found that AI-driven clinical decision support software (AI-CDS) has the potential to improve diagnostic accuracy, standardize care, and enhance efficiency, while also providing educational benefits to providers.
For example, Stanford Medicine researchers utilized AI-CDS technology to review medical charts, seeking signs that children with ADHD received the appropriate follow-up care when using new medications.
AI-powered EHRs and predictive analytics may also soon help identify children at risk for chronic conditions, like asthma or obesity, enabling earlier intervention. Research also shows that this technology is used to predict autism spectrum disorder (ASD) risk based on high-prevalence comorbidity clusters detected in EMRs.
Deeper integration with wearable devices and parent-facing health apps will also provide a more holistic view of a child’s health, bridging the gap between office visits.
In terms of the future of EHRs, an American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) report cites,
“Pediatricians have a deep interest in standardizing the features of EHR systems and certifying their functions. They aim to ensure that pediatric-specific functions, terminology, and data precision are incorporated into these standards and certification processes. They want this not only to make their own systems more effective in improving the health of children but also to make all EHR systems more useful for patients of all ages."
Empowering Pediatric Care with the Right EHR
Choosing an EHR is one of the most critical decisions your practice will make. A purpose-built pediatrician’s EHR streamlines your workflows, reduces administrative burdens, and enhances the safety and quality of care you provide.
Contact DrChrono today to discover how an all-in-one, specialized EHR can serve as an extension of your care team. By embracing technology that understands your needs, you can empower your practice to thrive and focus on what you do best: helping children grow up healthy and strong!
Pediatricians EHR FAQ
What makes an EHR system ideal for pediatricians?
An ideal pediatric EHR is user friendly, tailored to child-specific health data, supports growth tracking, offers age-specific templates, and facilitates easy communication with families.
How do pediatric EHRs differ from general EHRs?
Pediatric EHRs include features specific to child healthcare, such as growth charts, immunization schedules, developmental screening tools, and age-appropriate documentation, which are not typically found in general EHRs.
What are the must-have features in a pediatric EHR?
Essential features include growth monitoring tools, immunization tracking, developmental assessment templates, easy parent/guardian communication portals, and dental or behavioral health integrations.
How can an EHR improve pediatric workflow efficiency?
EHRs streamline documentation, automate immunization alerts, facilitate quick access to growth and development data, and support communication with families—saving time and allowing more focus on patient care.