Electronic software offers a varying scope of benefits, but the initial plunge into electronic medical records can be intimidating, especially for those offices still attached to paper records. While paper records certainly serve their use, EMR for mental health providers provides professionals with efficiency, ease of use, and more secure storage. Not convinced? Take a look at some the benefits listed below, and decide for yourself.
Billing takes time. If you’re manually billing your claims, not only does it take up an employee’s time, but the turnaround time isn’t very fast, either. And if you don’t have an electronic system in place, your company is subject to a 1% decrease in Medicare and Medicaid payments. With electronic software, you have to option to send all your claims to a clearinghouse, which then distributes those claims to the correct insurance company. No spending time trying to figure out which clients get billed under which insurance: the software does it for you.
Paper records are easily misplaced. It’s happened before: a chart goes missing from your files. The clinician is in session, so you can’t interrupt at the moment to find out if they grabbed it. The work that you need to do with that client chart is put on hold until you can ask the clinician about it, or search through hundreds of other files to find out if it’s been misfiled. With electronic medical records, this problem is eliminated. You have access to the same records your clinicians do, at any time, and for any length of time.
Paper takes up space. And office space is not infinite, especially in the cases of those small practices. EMR for mental health providers merely takes up the space of a computer, eliminating the problems that arise with limited office space and storage.
