At the beginning of the Meaningful Use program, acute providers were the first wave of physicians and medical facilities required to adopt electronic medical records. Their patients were often in immediate pain, which made streamlining patient care a high priority.
Now providers who deal with elective procedures and treatments are adopting EHRs, and the added waiting time has probably been a benefit to this group of buyers. Options for behavioral health professionals, even a few years ago, were limited and offered less functionality than they do today. For example, e-prescribing was somewhat new in 2009. Now it’s become a standard for competent EHR systems.
However, despite widespread increases in functionality, choosing the right EHR is still a complex task. Specialists must search for templates designed to record the proper information, coding functions targeted toward their procedures, and clinical workflow modules that suite their practice. Behavioral health organizations can also accommodate a number of different specialists, making the flexibility and functionality of an EHR even more important.
