The Best EHR Software Systems in 2019
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Electronic health records (EHRs) play a major role in the improvement of healthcare services. In fact, a survey reports that 88% of surveyed practitioners found EHR rewarding for their practice, and 75% reported better patient care due to EHR. And the EHR market is only expected to grow, with almost all EHRs experiencing a growth in market share.
However, selecting the top EHR vendors and EHR consulting professionals can be a challenge.
In this article, we’ll help you compare types of EHR, common pain points, alongside must-have features to consider when choosing the best EHR software solution.
Here’s a list of top EHR Software 2019.
Top EHR Vendors
1. AthenaHealth
AthenaHealth is one of the types of EHR systems that’s fully HIPAA certified and supports a clinician’s workflow. This is a cloud based EHR, the primary features are appointment scheduling, billing, compliance checks, charting, and e-prescribing.
Features and Benefits:
- It allows you to key in data via a keyboard and has a voice recognition feature
- A patient portal that enables patients to book appointments, access practice forms, and settle their co-pay dues online.
- Automated messaging for reminders to patients (send patients prompts for appointments and billing and alerts for test results that patients can view on the portal)
- Administrative functions for medical billing, inventory management, physician management. The software also links with accounting and policy management.
With considerable automation, the software emerges as an ideal tool for medical practitioners who want to cut down on time wasted and streamline productivity.
This top EHR product offers support framework for pediatric care, anchoring vaccine management, and custom bundles.
Training on the use of this best EHR software has a multitude of options; webinars, live online, face-to-face, and through documentation.
Downside
Potential downsides you might face (if you don’t have a managed service provider) are data storage and the access to support and assistance.
2. Allscripts
Allscripts is an ARRA-certified EHR that offers a range of top EHR products to satisfy different user demands.
As opposed to most top EHR systems, this tool centers on small and medium scale physician practices. Instead of offering a single EHR solution to cover an array of needs, it has several products to achieve the objectives.
These options include:
- Allscript Community Care—Single platform software hosted on Microsoft Azure. This tool is biased toward fulfilling the demands of community hospitals.
- Allscripts TouchWorks EHR—Serves physician practices regardless of size. Its design bolsters efficiency and aims to restructure the clinician’s workflow.
- Allscripts Professional EHR—Intended for significantly smaller physician practices. Inherently, the solution is built to support clinicians by being more user friendly while also offering configurability.
Features and Benefits:
Depending on the package you select, Allscripts bundles together:
- Handwriting and voice recognition to support charting.
- Appointment scheduling alongside a self-service portal for patients.
- Meaningful-use certification; with users offered financial incentives of an EHR.
- Open platform
- E-prescribing tools
Shortcomings
- Clunky interface with some users holding reservations about how it displays information.
- While the solution has a version that can run on Microsoft, the same doesn’t apply for Mac.
- On the mobile front it supports iOS, but lacks an Android version
Interesting in learning more? Check out these blogs:
Understanding the pros and cons of EHRs
How EHRs can prevent physician burnout
3. NextGen
NextGen Healthcare is a top ambulatory EHR that can reach any practice, regardless of the size. The electronic health record solution also focuses on population health management while acting as a connected platform.
Features and Benefits:
NextGen Healthcare offers two plans.
(i) NextGen Office—benefits smaller practices (in the range of 1-10 providers). It offers an all-inclusive package that includes a cloud-hosted EHR platform, practice management, an RCM/medical billing system, and a patient portal.
(ii) NextGen Enterprise—benefits larger practices with specialty-specific clinical content. It integrates practice management, RCM/clearing house, advanced analytics and on top of that electronic data exchange.
On the financial side, billing support includes code and charge entry, insurance verification, claims processing, and remittance advice. NextGen enhances collection through affording practices specific features. For instance, claims scrubbing to perceive and eradicate medical billing errors—thus resulting in moderately faster and cleaner claims.
Equally, a practice can leverage the top EHR companies’ tools to help in dealing with weakened credit card payments while minimizing missed charges.
The tool provides flexible support to cater to multi-office practice situations through its cloud-based functionality that connects different locations.
Drawbacks
- Steep learning curve that can be time consuming
- Large amounts of time upfront to customize the templates to suit a clinic’s needs
- Speed concerns—granted its cloud-based, the tool’s swiftness is dependent on the physician’s bandwidth.
- Frequent upgrades that end users have to accommodate the requisite downtime if you do not use a managed service provider.
Support
NextGen Healthcare runs as a SaaS—cloud-connected EHR. The health information technology portal runs on Windows, MacOS, Android, and iOS.
4. Centricity (Virence Health)
Virence Health Centricity (formerly known as GE Centricity)—is an EMR that provides an all in one package with population health, health systems, patient engagement, and analytics. This suite can easily integrate with other practice software solutions.
As one of the best EHR systems, Centricity can offer customized workflows and share data across healthcare ecosystems—including other providers and financial utilizing HIPAA compliant data transfers.
Features and Benefits:
- The software has a modular approach—making it simple to navigate and assist with decision support
- Has a patient portal that enables practices to schedule appointments, locate test results, besides allowing you to access billing options for settling payments as well.
- Offers a mobile app
- It integrates with Practice Management (PM) platforms.
Overall, Centricity is a moderately comprehensive and standard EHR package that can be beneficial for small to medium practices.
5. Epic
Epic EMR is a reliable platform that’s targeted towards hospitals with different specialist teams. The tool provides various screens and workflows aimed at patient care—extending to specialty and ancillary care.
Likewise, it grants practices billing and health insurance administration options. Plus, it gives you the ability to work across multiple health providers.
Importantly, Epic EMR is a robust EHR tool that performs what it’s designed to do in various specialist ways. And accordingly, it offers practices a wide range of options as it runs from the cloud while affording you mobile-friendly interfaces.
6. Cerner
Cerner ranks as one of the best EHR systems because of its focus on inpatient care—serving medium and large practices.
The Cerner EMR provides a unified electronic health record system that can facilitate the work of clinicians, as well as physicians, nurses, pharmacists, besides other ancillary health personnel.
Features and Benefits:
- Cost reduction
- Enhanced patient safety
- Customizable—allowing practices to adapt the EMR tool for a variety of deployments
- Cerner excels in integrating HIPAA-compliant data sharing features
- Supports e-Prescribe in a safe and secure process
- Has a process for ordering laboratory tests electronically
- Patient Portal provides a secure link for direct interactions between clinicians and their patients..
Cerner provides flexibility, with its auto-texting feature that simplifies a clinician’s workload, reducing the burden of inputting information—subsequently decreasing the time you require to complete a document.
It also provides other options, such as voice recognition and code words. This feature eases privacy concerns while also mitigating entry errors and staff costs.
Cons:
- Data entry into medical records can take time
7. Meditech
As an on-premise electronic health record system, Meditech EHR provides healthcare professionals with clinical charting for midsized and community hospitals.
Features and Benefits:
- This HIPAA compliant system grants clinicians the ability to securely view patient vitals, lab reports, medication information, patient’s health history/notes, and diagnostic imaging.
- Meaningful Use Stage 2-certified.
- The clinical panel permits physicians, along with caregivers to check a patient’s current activity alongside group selected pieces of information on a single screen.
- Ability to customize the EHR tool such that it suits a physician’s specialty—allowing for the initial display of relevant information only.
What else makes Meditech list among the top EHR providers? The platform takes concerted steps to increase interoperability with other systems—providing Continuity of Care Documents (CCDs) that catalogs valuable information regarding patient visits or hospital stay.
Further, it allows you to either print or electronically transmits files for future reference during the patients’ visit or appointment even outside the system.
What is the best EHR software?
An EHR practice management system provides the healthcare industry the ability to streamline patient care. Top EHR platforms support clinicians in the management of patients’ data, while also improving patient experiences. If you need help finding the right EHR for you, contact us for a free consultation.
