The Case For Cloud Based EHRs in Medical Billing – An infographic by the team at Physician Practice Revenue Cycle Managment Services
EMRs, when they first emerged, were indeed great news for the medical profession as a whole, and medical billing and medical coding segmentsin particular. The transition to a paperless office, besides freeing up precious real estate occupied by clunky cabinets led the way to a revolution in terms of efficiency, data security, accessibility, and analytics for a variety of purposes. Its effect on the medical billing workflow can be easily gauged by the following chart:
But the path to EMR adoption was not all bed of roses. Besides the mandates of federal agencies in the adoption of only certified EMRs, there were questions of interoperability, costs, and upgradation capabilities. Not to mention data recovery in case of hardware crashes, which were quite common in a client-server software architecture. Thus the wheels of progress turned in the case of EMR too, and we are now witnessing one of the most exciting phases in EMR adoption in the form of cloud-based EMRs.
An undisputed market leader in the segment is the PracticeFusion-Kareo duo, for which BillingParadise is proud to say, it has been appointed as a certified consultant.
The hardware outages have been almost completely eliminated by such cloud-based EMRs, which utilize data centers resistant to power fluctuations, natural disasters, and even security breaches; now commonplace in conventional EMRs, which at best reside in a clinic’s server room with barebones firewall to repel outside infiltration, and a lock & key serving as internal security.
But cloud-based EMRs have data stored in a scrambled fashion at the architecture layer, thus even access is of no use to a data thief, unless they hold the key to unscramble them.
Also, the EMRs of the future will be looking to integrate such capabilities as IVR (Interactive Voice Response), through which the physicians can glean data anywhere, anytime. Of course, such a capability can be envisioned only in the presence of a central online repository like the data centers of cloud-based services.
Even the Natural Language Understanding tool of an EHR can be optimally utilized only if the dictating device can plug seamlessly into it from anywhere, and thus cloud-based EHRs can ideally complement the dictation capture capabilities of devices such as the iphone.
In short, it won’t be an exaggeration to say that the Cloud might one day be the only operational architecture for a medical billing EHR.
