How eClinicalWorks Integration can improve Health Interoperability

eClinicalWorks is a leading healthcare software development company in the United States. Nearly a million medical professionals use eClinicalWorks’ medical software to manage clinical and administrative activities. These solutions are aimed at large hospitals, ambulatory clinics, and private practices. One of the hallmarks of the company’s suite of products and services is interoperability. eClinicalWorks integration solutions streamline the access to patient information for providers across the country.

What Makes eClinicalWorks Integration Solutions Different?

eClinicalWorks is a member of the CommonWell Health Alliance. It is a non-profit organization composed of providers and healthcare software development companies. The mission of this organization is to break down technological and procedural barriers to the sharing of medical information across the United States.  

Data silos often impede the operational efficiency of organizations. Nowhere else is this issue of data siloes felt more than in the healthcare industry. Numerous companies develop a broad range of custom healthcare software solutions like billing platforms, EMR systems, appointment scheduling, and practice management solutions. The varying programming languages, information formats, and standards make it difficult for EHRs and other clinical software to exchange data.  

Difficulty in accessing medical data increases the chances of medication errors or side effects in treatments. This is because gaps in the necessary patient information might conceal vital information about allergies, adverse drug reactions, or previous diagnoses that might lead to further complications. Patients would have visited clinics or hospitals in other cities and states and seen different providers over the years. As a result, providers need to be able to access patients’ data easily, wherever it might be. So, this fragmented data spread across multiple locations needs to be accessed seamlessly.  

This is where the eClinicalWorks EHR system and its interoperability solutions help. The company has developed Prizma, a health information search engine. It aggregates health information from small clinics and large hospitals where the EHR systems participate in the Carequality and CommonWell Health Alliance networks. Furthermore, PRISMA also makes information from insurance payers and wearable medical devices accessible. This means medical information from thousands of EHRs will be made available to providers through PRIZMA, which is integrated directly into the eClinicalWorks EHR.  

Having a consolidated view of a patient’s medical information drawn from multiple sources greatly improves clinical outcomes. This is especially true in the case of people suffering from chronic diseases. This not only helps to overcome the many barriers to interoperability but also does so cost-effectively.

List of eClinicalWorks Integration Services

Medical software platforms like advanced telehealth solutions, laboratory information systems (LIS), and radiology platforms are vital in interoperability and integration. When merged with medical records software like the eClinicalWorks EMR, they lead to integrated healthcare solutions for managing hospital workflows. Such a comprehensive platform makes it easy for one organization to exchange relevant data among different departments for better operational efficiency.  

For example, when a doctor orders a lab test or radiology scan for a patient, the request is transmitted to the department. Subsequently, it is processed on the LIS or radiology information software (RIS), where the activity is scheduled and carried out. Later, the results are automatically communicated to the LIS or RIS, respectively, and stored in the EHR. This allows the physician to view it and the billing department to fetch this information for coding.  

Let’s look at the medical platforms that eClinicalWorks EHR integration can work with – 

1. Radiology Information System    

The inbuilt eClinicalWorks API support bi-directional communication with a RIS platform that supports the HL7 format of messages. The reports and scans will be uploaded to the patient’s electronic records. This makes it easy for the providers to view and share them within and outside the organization.  

2. Electronic Prescriptions

eClinical Works’ EHR system supports an electronic prescription feature, either built-in during development or integrated later through APIs. This will allow providers to send prescriptions directly to the pharmacy electronically. Moreover, the doctors can also view the list of covered drugs for each patient and only prescribe those to avoid hassles. This feature also enables them to prescribe controlled substances.  

Furthermore, this also eliminates the need for patients to handle paper-based prescriptions, which can be lost or misplaced. Electronic prescriptions also avoid the chances of medication errors due to the illegible handwriting of doctors.  

3. Lab Testing Platform  

This software system manages laboratory operations like sample collection, test scheduling, sample tracking, report generation, and billing. eClinical Works EMR supports all LIS systems compatible with HL7 messaging formats. Just as in the case of RIS platforms, the results from lab tests are directly uploaded to the patient’s health records.  

4. Medical Devices

eClinicalWorks integration solutions can facilitate interoperability with a wide range of medical devices. These include heart rate monitors, blood pressure cuffs, spirometers, devices used for lab analysis, medical imaging, ophthalmology, and so on. The vital signs obtained from these devices can securely be stored in the patient’s medical records.  

This is beneficial for leveraging healthcare analytics solutions for assessing the vital signs for insights. Changes in a person’s heart rate, electrocardiogram, oxygen saturation, and temperature over time can indicate early disease symptoms.  

5. Health and Fitness Tracking Devices

The last few years have seen a gradual increase in the popularity of wearable medical tracking devices. These include Apple’s Smartwatch and Fitbit, among others. These monitor the user’s vitals and store them on a secure database. The use of these devices as a remote patient monitoring system was realized during and right after the Covid-19 pandemic.  

By integrating these devices with the eClinical Works EMR, doctors and caregivers can remotely monitor patients’ health signs. This has been noted to have enormous potential for elder care in the country. Observing people’s health outside of clinical settings can go a long way in addressing the problem of a shortage of caregivers for aging seniors.  

6. Financial Management Solutions

eClinical Works is interoperable with various EHR (Allscripts EMR included) platforms for exchanging financial information. The exchange can happen in the HL7 format, and the data can include reimbursements, out-of-pocket payments, balances, and so on.  

Conclusion 

eClinicalWorks has been a market leader in the design and development of healthcare software. Its products are used by almost one hundred thousand hospitals, clinics, and practices in the United States and globally. But the company’s real contribution to healthcare might be its innovations in interoperability.  

A large portion of Americans are known to have incomplete medical records. This is because of several reasons, like unequal access to care and data siloes by varying EHR systems. But eClinicalWorks’ solutions have helped providers serve patients better by improving access to aggregated medical information. With increasing technology adoption in the industry, data will be an increasingly important factor in the quality of services. In light of this, eClinicalWorks is well-placed to reap the rewards and serve its stakeholders.

References 

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