Telehealth, EHR Integration In the Modern Healthcare Sector

Telehealth electronic health record (EHR) integration offers a myriad of benefits to both healthcare providers and their patients. Remote healthcare, a sector which oversees remote patient is among the sectors benefiting from telehealth. For the longest time, excessive health IT use has led to clinician burden. Thus, clinical experts are considering ways of integrating telehealth into the clinical sector. According to these experts, the only way to integrate the clinical sector into telehealth is to combine telehealth and EHR. EHR has been an important topic in the clinical setting, and it would be great if they embraced telehealth in the same way.

The office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology states that the US Department of Health & Human Services has been able to certify about ninety-six percent of the non-federal acute care hospitals with an EHR. EHR is important because it coordinates care for patients, stores patient data, and tracks patient progress. It is, therefore, essential to streamline virtual care in this system because it will make it easy for the clinicians, and this will, in turn, boost patient care.

Importance of Telehealth Integration

Clinical workflows are bound to improve through the integration of telehealth into the EHR system. Telehealth providers work to design solutions that integrate with the EHR system, and this improves patient care. Patient care will improve when clinicians streamline telehealth solutions and EHR systems in a single workflow. Patients desire something that will give them an experience as though they were physically present in the doctor’s office.

EHR telehealth integration will benefit patients and health providers. Through this integration, the documentation process becomes easy, and the clinician burden reduces significantly. Telehealth integration also reduces the time patients spend traveling to clinic settings, and this enhances patient flexibility. Integration reduces cognitive workflow, and clinical burden since the clinician does not need to make multiple clicks between documentation and video screens.

It becomes possible to automate data entry through EHR integration, meaning you do not need to key inpatient information severally. The clinician will need to create a summary of the visit soon after the telehealth visit is over. Telehealth integration allows the patient to schedule a future appointment with the receptionist after their doctor’s appointment.

EHR Integration Portals

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the use of telehealth solutions in 2020. However, telehealth integration made its way through the medical sector a few years back.

• Cerner: It was able to work with Amwell to integrate telehealth into its patient portal known as HealtheLife in 2016. In 2020, Cerner has worked tirelessly to ease the burden of COVID-19.
• Athenahealth: athenahealth integrated athenaTelehealth into its EHR system to curb the COVID-19 pandemic. This telehealth service is useful because it allows for video conferencing, billing, and EHR documentation.
• Other EHR integration portals include MEDITECH and Allscripts.