While electronic health records (EHRs) are comprehensive tools able to serve pediatricians in everything from billing to practice management, clinical records are the backbone of a great EHR and of pediatric practice. When looking for an EHR that suits your practice, what kinds of clinical charts should you be looking for? In this post, we’ll outline key things to look for in a clinical records software, including a system that follows your practice’s workflows, training needs, and elevates patient experience.
The Best Clinical Charts for Safe, Accessible Patient Information
According to HealthIT.gov, as of 2019 around 72% of office-based clinicians had adopted an EHR or EMR (electronic medical record). An EMR is essentially a digital version of paper charts and notes recorded during patient visits, while an EHR expands clinicians’ abilities even further by providing services like billing, payments, patient messaging, and much more.
It can be argued that the medical record of an EHR product is its most important service, as it contains the secure and vital diagnostic and medical history data of all patients in the practice, and forms the basis for pediatricians’ and pediatric providers’ ability to care for patients. It also requires different aspects for each member of a pediatric practice to succeed.
For Pediatricians and Clinicians
For pediatricians, nurse practitioners, and other providers at your practice, clinical workflows have to adhere – or be configurable to – the way that your practice operates. Workflows that are disjointed and don’t follow the “way we do things” cause frustration and could even lead to errors at the start. Clinicians are also focused on serving their patients, so clinical charts on new software need to be accessible and intuitive: history follows demographics, and so on.
For Office Managers and Front Desk Staff
Office managers also need to be able to access the right tools in the clinical charts. An ideal chart system will allow OMs and staff to access the demographic and patient information they need and have the ability to schedule appointments for providers. For managers and practice owners alike, the trainability of the software for staff and nurses will be important too – easier training means an easier implementation period and a faster step towards serving patients.
A Tour Through PCC’s Clinical Charts
Patient records for children are slightly different than those for adult patients. That’s why PCC EHR’s clinical charts are built specifically for the needs of pediatricians serving a patient population unlike any other.
A pediatric chart needs to incorporate many things. Clinically, kids’ bodies develop sometimes rapidly between visits, they may have chronic illness or a disability to manage, and their social, emotional, academic, and behavioral needs should be taken into account. Logistically, kids require more planning from offices: they often have siblings who need care too, and the shifting dynamics of family life, from grandparents to step-parents, come into play too.
With so much information to digest in just a few minutes, PCC EHR has made it so that pediatricians can focus on the patient and family, while the EHR helps predict your next move. PCC EHR is configurable, so you can set it up how you want it at the start. Plus, you can always reconfigure templates, create new reports with the help of your Client Advocate, your practice’s personal PCC contact. Here are just some of the ways PCC EHR’s clinical charts can help your practice. Click on the heading to view the video from PCC Learn.
Custom Auto-Notes and Answer Memory Speed Up Charting
The Auto-Notes feature lets you assess and record a visit more efficiently. When you have an 8-year-old who’s presenting for a well visit without any concerns, click the “Make All: NL” button to “make all normal” – a normal which you can pre-configure, so that appropriate notes appear in the description field, making a quick but descriptive note with one click. Discovered an ear infection? You can make changes without affecting the other fields and make notes appropriately.
Over time, the EHR can also record your common answers to the clinical chart fields and supply options for you, either by patient or provider. Answer Memory can help physicians who chart differently speed up their own process, or help you select the most common notes so you don’t have to type them repeatedly.
Sibling Charting
Pediatricians treat kids, but kids have siblings and parents are short on time. It’s not uncommon to treat multiple siblings in a single visit, but when you can’t have more than one chart open at once, toggling between two children can be frustrating. PCC’s Siblings Component allows your office to open sibling charts and toggle between them – and you can choose to place this feature in the Medical Summary, phone notes, or any other notes.
Expand Short Text into Common Phrases with Snap Text
To save even more time on chart notes, phone notes, and any other note, PCC’s Snap Text allows individual users to customize short phrases that will auto-populate into longer text. For example, type “MDD” to populate “Maximum Daily Dose” in the chart, or “sleep” to populate a paragraph about sleep recommendations into a phone note or a message to a parent. Check out the video below to see the Snap Text tool in action!
Did you hire someone new or do you like another user’s list? Snap Text phrases can be copied from user to user to share the feature. It’s so easy, it’s a snap.
Pediatricians: Chart Your Way Through PCC EHR
Independent pediatricians get their start often because they want to practice medicine the way they envision medicine should be. They want to connect with communities, improve care for children, and do so without oversight and requirements that stifle the joy from practicing pediatrics. There are all sorts of types of charting in electronic health records, but the one that matters is the one that fits your practice’s workflow and your patients’ needs.
PCC is proud to support the mission of independent pediatricians by building an EHR for pediatricians, by pediatricians. We’ve built features like Snap Text, Clinical Alerts, and much more at the request of our independent providers, so that not only is the EHR configurable for your practice, it’s also a custom tool that every independent pediatrician can wield the way they want to.
There’s so much more to discover in PCC EHR to start or build the practice you’ve envisioned. Contact us today for a demo to see the EHR in person, try out Snap Text for yourself, and learn what practices around the country love about PCC EHR.
