Guide to the Benefits of Electronic Health Records: Will They Save You Time?

One of the widely-touted benefits of electronic health records is that they save you a ton of time. We agree that, for many clinicians, it will.

Are you one of them? Or will an EHR slow you down? To answer that, you should consider…

Doing a time study.

How do you do a time study? Keep it simple for these purposes: Spend a few days recording tasks you do and how long it takes to do them. Then, compare those measurements with measurements from an EHR application. Make sure the tasks you measure are the ones you do frequently.

Need an EHR to test against? Contact us to give BreezyNotes a shot.

To help you determine the time-saving benefits of electronic health records, we’ve provided a list of tasks that therapists in practices ranging from solo to group complete frequently. And, we’ve provided time measurements for each task from our EHR application, BreezyNotes EHR®.

Scheduling an appointment

Time in an EHR: 5 seconds (single), 10 seconds (repeating)

Looking up the details of an appointment (i.e. which clinician, what type of visit, etc.)

Time in an EHR: 4 seconds

Submitting a claim to insurance

Time in an EHR: 5 seconds

Recording a payment (cash, insurance, etc.)

Time in an EHR: 9-15 seconds depending on the payment method (from a client), 15 seconds (from an insurance company using electronic remittance advice)

Determining how much you need to pay all of your contractors for a two week period

Time in an EHR: 10 seconds

Finding out what payments for the last two months are past due

Time in an EHR: 8 seconds

Determining how much you’ve been paid year-to-date

Time in an EHR: 6 seconds

Creating invoices for all open balances

Time in an EHR: 17 seconds

Copying and pasting

Time in an EHR: You shouldn’t need to do this if you’re using a well-designed EHR application, like BreezyNotes EHR. BreezyNotes EHR benefits your time by putting information you entered in one place into all the other places where you need it.

That’s by no means an exhaustive list of frequent tasks. But, it should get you started.

Now, there’s one task that will hopefully never happen to you, but is still important to consider:

Recovering from the destruction of your records

Time in an EHR: Like copying and pasting, this is a task you’ll never have to do with a good EHR. For instance, with BreezyNotes EHR, your data is securely stored and backed up in three different sets of servers in completely separate locations. That way if one, or even two, servers are destroyed, your data is still intact and accessible. It’s one of the benefits of electronic health records that can’t reasonably be replicated on paper.

With paper records, if your office had a fire or a robbery, you would have to start from scratch, which could take days or weeks

Generally, an EHR application like BreezyNotes will be a time-saver. However, our position is that you should do what makes you successful. So do your due diligence to ensure that using an EHR will lead you and your practice to success.

“Grains” Copyright  2010 Judit Klien CC-BY-ND 2.0

If an EHR will save you time, check out BreezyNotes EHR. It’s a fast, friendly, and responsive EHR application built exclusively for behavioral health clinicians.

See how BreezyNotes EHR has helped our customers–people just like you–on our testimonials page.