Medical Software Solutions for Behavioral Health

Most EHRs will provide your medical team handful of basic features. Prescribing medications and creating treatment plans have become standard across the industry. However, there is so much more that an EHR can offer your medical team.

Allow us to identify three essential medical software solutions. They will help your medical team provide quality treatment to your patients and thus improve their outcomes.

1) Multi-Patient MAR Functionality

For behavioral health and addiction treatment organization that prescribe medications, Medication Administration Record (MAR) features are crucial.

Today, most EHRs offer a MAR that helps physicians administer medications with ease and manage them securely. The degree of functionality from one MAR to the next is where some EHRs begin to differentiate themselves from others.

For example, an effective MAR will allow users to create lists of the patients they will be performing medical tasks for. As a result, facility managers can account for which staff are administering which medications to which patients.

Furthermore, your staff will benefit from the structure that an organized list of patients provides them. These lists can simplify your medical team’s process so that they can select a patient directly from the list, rather than having to add patients individually.

Intuitive EHRs can facilitate this process even more. Some platforms offer the option to automatically remove patients from the list once they have gotten their medications. This is a good safety protocol. It will eliminate any confusion on which patients still need attention, and which ones have been taken care of.

2) Medication Interaction Checking

Interaction Checking is another great medical feature to look for in an EHR.

When prescribing medications, your EHR should alert your medical team if the proposed medication has any interactions with the patient’s current medications and/or condition. This type of function is also know as decision support.

An optimal drug interaction checking tool will alert your staff to the following adverse interactions:

• Drug to Drug Interaction: Alerts you if the drug you are prescribing has an interaction with one the patient is already prescribed.
• Patient Allergy Interaction: Alerts you if the patient is allergic to the medication you are prescribing.
• Demographic Interaction: Alerts you if you are trying to prescribe a medication that is inadvisable based on the patient’s demographic information. For example, the system will prevent the prescription of medication that is not suited for geriatric populations to an elderly patient.
• Disease Interaction: Alerts you if you are prescribing a medication that is not suited for patients with a certain diagnosis. For example, a patient diagnosed with alcoholism will not be able to take certain medications. The system should protect against that.
• Food Interaction: Alerts you if you are prescribing a medication that will interfere with the food in a patient’s diet.
• Duplicate Theory: Alerts you if you are prescribing a medication that the patient has already been prescribed.

These interaction checking tools help your medical team feel safe about administering medications. And, most importantly, it ensures that your patients are receiving safe and optimal care.

3) Waiting Room Feature

EHRs that offer waiting room features can greatly improve processes for your entire facility, but especially your front desk staff.

They have to manage the flow of patients through the office in a real world clinical setting, which can be hectic and unpredictable. Any tools that assist your front desk staff in facilitating an efficient waiting room, such as a dynamic scheduler, will benefit your overall operation.

An EHR’s waiting room feature should, at least, allow the front desk to check in patients with ease. Effective waiting room tools can also notify the relevant care provider when a patient they are treating has checked in. It is also common for your EHR to alert both sets of staff which room the patient will be examined in.

As a result, there is no need for your front desk staff to physically locate any care providers. Instead, the proper staff is alerted that their patient has arrived directly and instantly without any extra work for the front desk.

Knowing the exact moment that a patient arrives, and which room they will be examined in, gives your care providers helpful notice. They can thus prepare for each appointment with as much notice as possible.

Granted, such waiting room features may only shave a few minutes off each patient’s visit. However, the accumulative effect of that saved time will contribute to your facility’s overall efficiency.

Medical Software Solutions that Improve Outcomes

We hope you feel more confident in the medical software solutions you should expect out of your EHR.

Here at Sigmund, we are passionate about improving outcomes for patients and providers. We have many former behavioral health professionals on staff, so a unique passion has driven our software innovations over the last 20 years.

We have seen firsthand how not having the right EHR tools can make the user’s life much harder, which in turn can negatively impact patient outcomes.

AURA, Sigmund’s enterprise EHR solution, offers leading medical features designed to facilitate behavioral health and addiction treatment. We are proud to provide our clients with a platform that empowers them to offer comprehensive and compassionate care to their patients.

Check out this video of Sigmund’s Bethany Lopez for another informed opinion on AURA’s medical capabilities! She discusses some of her favorite medical features in AURA based on her nursing background and feedback from our clients.

If you’re intrigued by what Bethany had to say, we’d love to show you just what AURA can do for your medical team. Speak to one of our knowledgable professionals here!