Vital Aspects that Pediatricians can’t afford to Overlook

Pediatricians have struggled to find software that addresses all of their needs. They commonly complain about the absence of “pediatric functions” which are mostly unavailable in generic electronic health record systems. Some functional areas are so critical to the care of infants, children, and adolescents that their absence results in the system disrupting the quality of pediatric care.

Pediatricians needs at different stages of their practice

1. 1. Before the patient’s visit – Send appointment reminders to parents, and prompt them to carry their children’s vaccination documents.
   2. Check-in – View inputs from parent’s responses to clinical information. Securely transfer these inputs to the patient record. This helps in reducing clicks and check-in time while enhancing communication and patient satisfaction.
   3. During the visit – Dictate and record the pediatric consultations as it happens and fully complete the documentation until the next encounter.
   4. Check out – Send procedure/service documentation back to the referring provider in real time.
   5. After the visit – Enable parents to better manage their children’s health. Securely send patient education resources, clinical results, and payment options.

Special requirements of Electronic Health Record for pediatrics:

Pediatric organizations require special types of equipment, special tests, special nurses, special doctors, and more importantly specialized Pediatric EHR software systems. Here are ten characteristics your pediatric EHR software should have:

1. Templates for visits: There are different treatments and examinations required for different kinds of children visits. With various age-specific and preloaded templates in place, your staff can quickly select and document as and when needed. Customized templates allow your staff to focus just on what is necessary for the visit without letting anything fall through the cracks.
2. Flexibility: Children’s medical needs change significantly as they grow. The EHR should be flexible enough to support, capture and generate screening forms and health summaries for secondary use of medical data, such as school or athletic forms.
3. Focus on Family History: Awareness of the child patient’s family history is the foremost requirement. The EHR should make it easy to enter and then locate details such as the family’s current medical problem, past medical records, and any medications or allergies to keep in mind. In particular, the mother’s medical history should be easily accessible before treating the infant.
4. Immunization Tracking: It’s essential to properly document which immunizations children have had and when they received each shot. Electronic immunization tracking is required to manage the process with easy access to each patient’s entire immunization at one place and to report these immunizations for state registries as required.
5. Vaccine Forecasting and Management: Vaccine forecasting and management are generally considered as one of the most important pediatric functionality of an EHR. Forecasting is complex and must adhere to local and regional immunization requirements.
6. Medication Management: In terms of medication management, enhancing an adult-focused CPOE system for safe pediatric medication management is an enormous and exceptional task
7. Pediatric Specific Growth Charts: A key functionality related to the child’s changing needs and physiology is the incorporation of pediatric-specific norms and growth charts into the EHR. The EHR requires to support longitudinal documentation of growth and development patterns. The growth chart should be readily available in the EHR and must measure weight, height or length, head circumference and calculate body mass index, growth velocity, percentiles and standard deviations based on population norms. The display should be available in a variety of formats that based on gender and patient’s condition
8. Integrated Lab results: Pediatric EHR software should enable to integrate the results from lab tests with the patient’s medical records. It should also allow ordering new lab tests directly from the EHR.
9. Chart in multiple Sibling Charts at the same time: Being able to update the records for all siblings of the same family with just a click or two can eliminate errors and save you and your staff’s valuable time. This seems important when you consider the family with three children and only one appointment. While charting the first visit, the ability to create another visit and open two additional charts can be a huge benefit. By recording those visits and then charging for them can make a dramatic difference in your bottom line.
10. Educational Resources: Pediatric EHR should have in-built age-appropriate educational content and alerts catering to patient education needs to be targeted to both parents and children. A repository of pediatric materials and integrated features that helps in reducing workload and give patients the information they need.

What are the benefits of investing in an EHR made Just for Your Specialty?

1. Chart Faster – Having a specialty focused pediatric EHR helps in saving time for every visit instead of wasting time navigating through menus that are least helpful to your specialty. Pediatric functionality allows you to decrease the amount of work you allocate to charting encounters and documenting office visits.
2. Quality Care for Children, better workflow for you – A wide variety of modules such as growth charts, vaccination information, and immunization management ensures better workflow for your practice’s growth.
3. Enjoy tailored content that suits your specialty – With a pediatric-specific EHR it will be like your EHR is reading your mind every time you start charting. It will help you create workflows and protocols that suits your needs, saving you time and frustration. It provides you with the opportunity to see more child patients and make more money.

Why you really need an EHR vendor specific to your pediatric practice?

If you want to give yourself the edge, pediatric EHR is a necessity. Children have unique health care needs and their providers have unique data needs. Choosing a specialty EHR specific to your pediatric practice will make your work easier and your practice more successful.

Why iPatientCare?

In this day and age, manually tracking the hustle and bustle in most pediatric practices is not efficient. For healthcare providers to guarantee a modern standard of care, avoid government penalties, and maintain practice revenues, iPatientCare has developed a specialty EHR system based on inputs from key pediatric thought leaders to enable effective, high-quality care for children.

The Resourceful iPatientCare Pediatrics EHR helps you in eliminating the hassle associated with creating and maintaining documents, charts, and reports manually. It is a fully integrated suite for pediatric needs that handles every aspect of your practice from the front desk to the exam room, and the billing office to the patient’s portal.