Advanced Guide To Behavioral Health EHR Software (Updated 2022)

As behavioral health EHR software delivers numerous benefits to both healthcare providers and patients, it continues to gain acceptance in today’s healthcare marketplace.

According to a recent study, one of the recent groups to adopt the widespread use of EHR software is behavioral health professionals. Yes, healthcare professionals know that managing behavioral and mental health practices is quite different than managing family medicine practices.

Why does it differ? Behavioral health practices may have complex processes and unique requirements which are not so important for primary care areas, and they need specialty-specific EHR software that has the capabilities to meet those requirements.  

Ready to explore everything about behavioral health? In this article, we cover what is behavioral health EHR software and why behavioral health practices need EHR, and what are the features and benefits of using it.

What is Behavioral Health EHR?

Behavioral Health EHR is a specialty-specific EHR software that enables behavioral healthcare practitioners to promote better continuity of care with the help of advanced healthcare technologies to improve patient outcomes in a short period. 

The best Behavioral Health EHR software enables collaborative care – the most important feature to treat patients effectively. Apart from the benefits for patients, behavioral health EHR software also helps to improve a practice’s workflow by decreasing administrative tasks such as documenting, appointment scheduling, and billing. This will create a positive impact on the practice and enhance better care delivery. 

Benefits of Behavioral Health EHR

1. Increased productivity

By integrating EHR with practice management software, the administrative team can easily automate calls to patients which helps to reduce the number of no-shows.

What’s more, the EHR software facilitates determining which patients need to come in for follow-up appointments, serving to fill empty appointment times now rather than later when there are fewer slots available.

2. Easy prescription tracking

Tracking prescriptions electronically ensures that patients are only receiving medication from a single provider. Otherwise, patients can abuse the system, obtaining multiple prescriptions for the same controlled substance from numerous doctors using different pharmacies.

Tracking also helps doctors verify that their patients are getting the prescriptions filled regularly.

3. Reduced Claim Denials

A major benefit of deploying electronic health record software in your behavioral health practice is that you can easily track the documentation always being completed with all necessary information.

If your organization fails to provide the needed information, you face delayed claims, denials of claims, or payments recouped by payers following audits. So behavioral health EHR software helps you avoid billing and reimbursement issues and improve the flow of revenue in your practice.

4. Improved Care Coordination

It is very beneficial for behavioral health practices to deploy EHR software, as this facilitates communication among providers, helping to avoid wasteful duplication of services.

After all, a patient may not be in a position to judge whether he or she is receiving redundant care, relying on the professionals to see to it that services are being provided efficiently.

Must-Have Behavioral Health EHR features

Once you have decided on investing in behavioral health EHR, it’s very important to know about the essential features that it should have. So, here are some of the important features to keep in mind when considering investing in a Behavioral Health EHR.

Easy Access To Patient Health Records

The best behavioral health EHR must have a feature to easily access the patient health record from various locations and devices which will be very helpful to behavioral health clinicians, who may be conducting treatments in different locations.

So a cloud-based EHR helps a lot for accessing patient data easily and securely – via a standard browser and internet connection. As the cloud-based EHR can be used on numerous devices including laptops, tablets, desktops, and smartphones, it automatically improves the practice workflows more than ever. 

ICD-10 Specialty Billing & Coding Support

Successful Behavioral Health EHR software not just includes features to improve patient care, but additionally has tools that help the clinical practice’s financial status, for example, making the medical billing process simpler and quicker by mapping ICD-10 codes to complaints. 

Having integrated EHR software decreases repetitive administrative tasks such as billing and coding processes and saves precious time in health practice and makes concentrate more on their patient’s health. 

RELATED: THE ADVANCED GUIDE TO ICD-10 CODING SYSTEM IN MEDICAL BILLING

Customizable Reports and Powerful Analytics Tools

The best Behavioral Health EHR offers healthcare information easily and quickly by generating reports. What do the reports hold? These reports mine the available data entered by various healthcare providers and staff at different times and locations.

These reports can also be customized based on the practice’s workflows and needs. Some of the best EHR software also includes power analytics tools such as prescription analytics and more.

HL7 Compliance and Multiple Specialties

Behavioral health practices often need to coordinate with other specialties to help their patients. So the best EHR software must include support for HL7 compliance and enable you to communicate with various specialties. For example, fostering communication with a neurologist or an internal medicine specialist.

RELATED: A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE TO HL7 FHIR FOR DEVELOPERS

Electronic Prescription (EPCS)

Electronic Prescription takes away a lot of the work and manual tracking involved in paper-based documentation and has the added advantage of allowing for such automated functionalities as checking for correct dosage and duplicate medications.

Electronic Prescription of Controlled Substances (EPCS) gives practitioners “the option of writing prescriptions for controlled substances electronically” and pharmacies the permission “to receive, dispense, and archive these electronic prescriptions”.

Advanced Security

Not only for Behavioral health practices, almost every individual practice like to have an advanced security feature in their EHR software for complete data safety. In the case of BH EHR, it must include multiple layers of access based on user credentials. So that only authorized members will be able to create patient records or access and modify them.

Healthcare practices still use paper-based systems for storing patient records and must rely on physical locks to access controls, which employees can circumvent through carelessness. So protecting important health records with advanced security features should be the top priority in behavioral health EHR.

RELATED: HOW TO IMPROVE PATIENT COLLECTIONS? THE ULTIMATE GUIDE

Final Thoughts

Now, you may be more familiar with the reasons why behavioral health practices need EHR software for improved health outcomes.

Although the usage of behavioral health EHR is not yet as familiar as those in primary care, they provide numerous benefits which are not possible with paper-based charts. So, Behavioral health professionals should take advantage of the latest developments and EHR to run their operations more effectively. 

CapMinds Behavioral Health EHR For Your Specialty

Our EHR is tailored to Behavioral and Mental Health programs. CapMinds EHR is very flexible and customizable according to the changing trend in the behavioral health industry including the top features – Practice Management, Patient Portal, Telehealth, Scheduling, Charting, Clinical Reports, Financial Reports, and Compliance Reports.