In recent years, the healthcare industry has seen massive change and it’s been largely driven by technology. In particular, medical records have seen dramatic innovation in one area. Over the past couple of decades, the transition from paper-based records to electronic health records (EHRs) has created new ways to manage patient data. With such systems, we have now, however, reached a point where the future of basic EHR systems and their further evolution to more advanced electronic medical record (EMR) systems will provide even greater efficiency and quality of care.
The Limitations of Early EHR Systems
In 2009, US healthcare organizations were encouraged to adopt EHR by the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, which gave financial incentives to get EHR systems. The rise of electronic health records (EHR) with paper digitization of patient information in EHRs spurred the adoption of the basic EHRs in the healthcare industry. However, these early EHR systems had some significant limitations:
- Data Silos: Patient data was often still siloed in individual EHR systems, hampering coordination of care.
- Interoperability Issues: Getting data to flow between different vendor EHR systems was difficult.
- Clunky Design: EHR systems were often cluttered with checkboxes and text fields, lacking intuitiveness.
- Cost Concerns: Ongoing costs of maintaining EHR systems and managing integrations were higher than projected.
These limitations, too, necessitated that the health IT systems continue evolving. It was not enough to simply digitize records; clinical workflow-specific software solutions, such as those enabled by custom healthcare software development, were needed.
The Promise of Next-Generation EMR Software
The shortcomings of basic EHR systems have driven demand for more modern platforms optimized specifically around clinical use cases – what we now call electronic medical records (EMR) software. There are a few key differences between earlier-generation EHRs and advanced modern EMR solutions:
- Enhanced Interoperability: Modern EMR software places a high priority on seamless system integrations and data sharing to unify patient records.
- Specialized by Setting: EMR platforms are purpose-built by medical setting (hospital vs. specialty clinic vs. general practice, etc.), with tailored workflows.
- Intuitive Design: Contemporary EMR systems emphasize user-centric design for faster clinical documentation and ordering.
- Scalability: Cloud-based EMR software offers easier scaling to add users and locations without heavy IT overhead.
- Predictive Analytics: Some advanced EMRs incorporate AI to surface relevant patient insights and analytics to providers.
Next-generation EMR solutions are designed to address the remaining inefficiencies of the paper era by advancing the core capability of interoperability, scalability, and data unification.
Development Trends Driving Innovation in EMR Software
What technology innovations are driving the ongoing changes in modern medical record systems? A few important software development trends stand out that are shaping EMR platforms:
API-First Architectures
Application programming interfaces (APIs) are ways for different pieces of software to talk to one another. Recently, EMR systems have moved towards API-first design, with their core architecture based on APIs. It is far easier to add new tools later or integrate with other IT health systems. However, access to clinical data can also be used for secondary use cases such as population health management or clinical research via APIs.
Cloud-Native Technology
Modern EMR solutions are almost exclusively cloud-based, meaning they are accessed over the Internet rather than run locally. This simplifies access and administration, and cloud-native architectures allow systems to scale rapidly. Developing natively for the cloud also enables tighter integration with other cloud tools healthcare organizations may use.
Agile Software Methodologies
The tech industry’s popularity of agile methodologies has been adopted by many health IT vendors who have ditched traditional, rigid ‘waterfall’ development methods. It gives us the ability to iterate faster over software based on user feedback. EMR Platforms can quickly roll out new features to meet new clinical needs with the help of agile methods and avoid locking rigid specifications ahead of time.
User-Centered Design
Today, user experience (UX) design and user interface (UI) optimization are priorities for EMR development teams. Better design means not just prettier screens but optimized clinical workflows. With user-centered design, we are able to reduce clicks, decrease the cognitive load for clinicians, surface key data more effectively, and streamline EMR navigation for various roles. That’s the evolution towards human-centered design principles that modernize EMR platforms.
Key Benefits Driving Adoption of Modern EMR Software
The technical innovations behind the transition away from basic EHRs and toward smarter EMR systems produce real benefits for healthcare organizations. Some of the most impactful perks include:
1. Improved Care Coordination
Lack of coordination across care settings is a huge problem in healthcare, often causing treatment delays or duplication of services. Modern EMR software helps unify patient records across the care continuum with better data integrations between hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, labs, and other partners. This single patient record with a more holistic view facilitates better care transitions.
2. Superior Clinical Workflow Optimization
Early EHR systems often slowed doctors down or proved disruptive to established clinical workflows. Contemporary EMR software is designed around enhancing existing physician workflows and surfacing relevant data more efficiently during patient encounters to maximize productivity. EMR developers work hand-in-hand with end users to eliminate pain points – yielding better optimization.
3. Enhanced Patient Engagement Capabilities
Today’s patients expect digital engagement and access to their health data. Leading EMR systems now incorporate patient portal tools for scheduling bill pay, remote patient monitoring, and communication with care teams – all integrated with the back-end clinical record. Patient engagement functionalities have become expected components in advanced EMR platforms.
4. Built-In Analytics & Decision Support
Artificial intelligence and predictive analytics tools are increasingly being baked into EMR software for activities like disease surveillance, clinical trial recruitment, medication adherence tracking, and optimized treatment planning. By leveraging data in the EMR, these tools provide helpful decision-support insights to clinicians at the point of care.
5. Superior Interoperability & Data Access
Early EHR systems couldn’t share data, but modern EMR software uses modern integrations, like FHIR APIs, to connect with external apps and partners effortlessly. But this opens up use cases like aggregation of patient records across systems, integration of wear data, and feeding data to external analytics tools. Unlocking more value of EMR data requires improved interoperability.
6. Increased Revenue Capture
For many providers, billing, and documentation are still challenging areas. Modern EMR tools offer features to simplify coding, charge capture, claims management, and reporting that helps practices generate maximum revenue. Optimized documentation workflows also increase clinician productivity, allowing for volume growth.
7. Scalability As Organizations Grow
Legacy on-premise EHR systems require significant local IT infrastructure and could be difficult to scale. However, cloud-based EMR software offers fast deployment, lower overhead, and seamless scaling to onboard new locations, users, and applications as healthcare groups expand – with no need for major upgrades. This scalability enables growth.
For healthcare organizations looking to modern workflows, improve care coordination, or lay digital foundations for the future – today’s cloud-powered EMR systems check all the boxes on functionality while easing the technical burden.
Overcoming Barriers to EMR Adoption & Implementation
For the obvious reasons, then why have some healthcare organizations been slow to move from basic EHR software to the more advanced EMR systems? There remain some barriers to adoption, including:
High Upfront Costs
While they’re less expensive in terms of continuing overhead, cloud EMR solutions are more expensive in terms of license subscriptions to the software, infrastructure, and the implementation services. For small or budget-constrained medical groups, the shift remains cost-prohibitive.
Complex Data Migrations
Transitioning historical patient data from existing EHR systems into a replacement new EMR platform is complicated. Most practices need external help managing these migrations – an added cost consideration. Data integrity risks during migrations also worry some providers.
Disruption During Rollouts
Like any major health IT project, rolling out an EMR system requires months of planning, user training, and workflow adjustments – during which productivity may dip temporarily. Some care centers lack the resources to own this disruption.
Limited IT Capabilities
Smaller clinics often lack dedicated health IT teams to vet options, manage integrations, customize workflows, handle user support, and continuously optimize EMR deployments over time. IT limitations remain an adoption barrier.
Clinician Resistance
Despite much better UX today, some clinicians remain reluctant towards EMR software due to bad prior experiences with hard-to-use EHR systems. This hesitation can slow executive decisions on upgrades. Winning over skeptical end users is key.
The Role of Technical Partners in EMR Success
To address common barriers around limited internal IT bandwidth, complex data migrations, clinician skepticism and the need for continued optimizations, most healthcare organizations turn to technical partners during major EMR rollouts:
- EMR Implementation Consultants. Specialized healthcare IT consultants choose and customize the EMR platform based on organizational needs while handling project management around rollouts.
- Integration & Migration Specialists. 3rd-party integration experts architect the connections between EMR systems and external apps needed for workflows. They also own legacy data migrations.
- Value-Added Resellers (VARs). VARs are sales partners for EMR that vendors package software with pre-built customizations, 3rd-party apps, migration help, training and support.
- Ongoing Technical Support. Many medical groups contract with specialized managed service providers (MSPs) to handle 24/7 help desk, EMR administration, troubleshooting and continuous optimizations after going live.
Selecting the right technical implementation and support partners is crucial for EMR success. Prior project experience, clinical domain expertise, integration capabilities and support breadth should be evaluated.
The Future: Increasingly Intelligent & Interoperable EMR Systems
While the adoption of core EMR software to digitize patient records continues, product innovation marches forward. The next horizon for medical record systems involves two macro trends:
- Rising Intelligence: Increasingly advanced predictive analytics artificial intelligence,and decision support capabilities will be baked into EMR platforms – taking insights to the next level.
- Expanding Interoperability: Seamless data integrations within the healthcare ecosystem via APIs will continue expanding – encompassing wearables, patient-generated data, social determinants of health, genomics, and more.
These two trends point toward EMR systems getting smarter and highly interconnected with the broader health data universe. This will unlock more predictive, preventative and personalized care powered by deeper patient insights.
The Bottom Line
Transitioning from first-generation EHR software to today’s cloud-based EMR systems powered by faster, more flexible technology unlocks massive benefits for healthcare organizations if executed thoughtfully. With care settings now increasingly interconnected, this shift towards platforms that unify data workflows is imperative. By selecting the right EMR partner and leveraging technical expertise to ensure smooth deployments, care providers can realize tremendous value – from optimized clinical operations in individual facilities to systemwide coordination, enabling truly patient-centric population health management. Ultimately, advanced EMR systems provide the digital foundations for healthcare’s data-driven future.