Top 10 Reasons You Can’t Manage Operations with Your EMR

Healthcare leaders have shared that the clinical documentation and billing functionalities of the Electronic Medical Record (EMR) are critical for patient care and revenue cycle management. However, these same executives also lament that the EMR lacks robust capabilities when it comes to operations, logistics, and the “flow” of patients, resources, and staff within, and across a hospital or health system. Now more than ever, health systems need an operational complement to the EMR, one that provides the visibility necessary to improve operations, patient access, and workflow management to create true enterprise-wide efficiency.

10 Reasons the EMR Can’t Keep Up with Your Operational Demands

1. Limited Real-Time Data: EMRs may not provide real-time updates on bed availability, leading to inaccurate information about capacity.
2. Disconnected Workflows: EMRs struggle to integrate with other systems used for bed management, leading to fragmented data and increased manual work.
3. Lack of Discharge Automation: Without predictive and automated discharge processes, you can’t remove the labor-intensive and manual task-related inefficiencies to open beds to new patients.
4. Patient Only View: The EMR is a patient-centric system, it does not provide a ‘single pane of glass’ in which you can see and manage capacity across the entire enterprise in a single view.
5. Lack of Interoperability: It’s difficult if not impossible to share data across different EMRs, or at times, even different instances of the same EMR.
6. Focus on Clinical Data: EMRs are primarily designed for clinical documentation & revenue cycle management, not operations, which can limit their effectiveness in tracking bed utilization and availability.
7. Potential for Errors: Relying on an EMR not designed for bed management can increase the risk of errors in capacity reporting and lost bed-time.
8. Poor Analytics: EMRs typically lack robust analytics capabilities that are essential for effective capacity forecasting and management.
9. Not Designed for Growth: The EMR is not built for growth. It is not possible to connect with, see, and manage patient referral sources, services, capacity, and transfer destinations across owned, affiliated, and other sites outside the four walls of the hospital.
10. Complexity and Overhead: Using an EMR for bed management can add unnecessary complexity and administrative overhead for the nursing staff, placement team and IT managers.