June 20, 2023
According to Mental Health America, 50 million Americans suffered from mental illness in 2022, yet over half didn’t receive treatment. One of the top reasons for such inadequate care is the lack of connection and proper data exchange between psychiatric and primary care providers. Thus, enhancing healthcare software interoperability is crucial to improve the population's mental health. And electronic health records (EHR) implementation in psychiatric organizations is the first and most vital step of this journey.
psychiatrists legally practice in the US
American Psychiatric Association
psychiatrists use EHR in their practice
National Library of Medicine
expected CAGR of the US behavioral health EHR market size by 2030
Grand View Research
Though psychiatrists and mental health professionals have different workflows, they often use the same core electronic health records system, supplementing it with third-party integrations if needed.
Scheme title: Mental health EHR architecture
Psychiatry EHR differs from other specialized software because it incorporates templates, terminology, and security settings for the mental health field that don’t match with those of general medicine.
Addiction disorder treatment organizations
Psychotherapists and counselors
Youth mental health specialists
Long-term psychiatric care facilities
Mental health care organizations serving veterans
Emergency psychiatric care centers
Neurodivergency specialists
Forensic psychiatrists
Geriatric mental health specialists
Clinical psychiatrists
Implementing an EHR solution tailored to a mental healthcare organization’s specifics boosts productivity and reduces expenses, which is proven by behavioral health providers’ success stories.
A small psychiatric practice in suburban St. Louis, Missouri, rapidly adapted to the influx of patients related to COVID-19 by implementing a specialized EHR. It achieved fiscal and clinical transparency, reduced prior authorization time from 24 hours to just one, and improved staff efficiency and satisfaction with voicemails and dictated notes transcription and transfer directly into the EHR.
Siouxland Mental Health Center facilitated care coordination among 14+ inpatient and outpatient settings and enhanced clinical workflows for 80+ medical professionals with specialized InSync behavioral health EHR and its customizable templates. Additionally, the new system simplified billing and reporting for regulatory compliance.
People sometimes don’t understand it’s not just about doing the notes — how effectively you’re communicating with a patient is important.
Sanjay K. Nigam, MD
psychiatrist and owner, Southern Illinois Associates, LLC
I would say 90% of what we do now is in the system, whereas before, only 40% of what we did was in the system, and we just spent hours scanning and uploading paperwork.
Jessi Maxwell
Siouxland’s quality lead and IHH team lead
EHR is at the heart of a psychiatry practice: interconnecting with other healthcare software, EHR improves an entire organization’s productivity.
Mental healthcare providers are using telehealth more frequently than any other specialists. Get an instant 360 view of a patient's health and make more data-based diagnoses by connecting your telemedicine platform to an EHR.
The success of psychiatric treatment depends mainly on trust between a patient and a provider. Give your patients more power over their health by allowing them to view and manage information about their condition via an EHR-connected patient portal.
Patient health monitoring is crucial for psychiatric practice. Get notified when your patient has an elevated heart rate due to an oncoming panic attack and view walking balance charts of patients with vestibular dysfunction from patients’ smart devices in your EHR.
Organize your psychiatry organization’s resources and personnel’s workload to streamline appointments and satisfy patients’ needs by integrating your HMS with EHR.
Give patients, caregivers, and healthcare providers the freedom to view and manage mental health information from anywhere at any time by integrating EHR with mobile apps.
With the help of integrated analytics software, you can understand your patients’ mental health patterns and their underlying causes more deeply and deliver especially personalized diagnosis and treatment.
Our experts help psychiatric care providers choose and integrate the best psychiatric EHR for their practice from the available platforms or develop a custom EHR to cover their specific needs.
One of the most prominent EHR and practice management software vendors, Epic can offer feature-reach customized solutions for almost any medical field.
Can be cloud-based or on-premise, depending on the client’s needs
Starts from $1,200 but goes up with each integration
No free trial, demo only
With such a robust variety of electronic health records software on the market, behavioral healthcare providers sometimes need help to choose and adopt the most fitting solution. Learn the eleven steps that lead to successful mental health EHR implementation.
Estimate the EHR implementation budget. Explore the market to understand the average cost of the envisioned system, including the hidden fees.
Mental health care providers can encounter several challenges while adopting psychiatric medical records software. However, most of them can be solved by carefully choosing, integrating, and tuning the EHR/EMR system.
Psychiatry specialists fear that the system will take their attention away from patient care.
Some practitioners believe that patient records would be susceptible to hacker attacks or loss due to system failure.
A lot of private practices claim that the cost of the psychiatry EMR/EHR is too high.
There are a variety of pricing models for behavioral health EHR/EMR software, with many of them suited for solo and small practices. If none fits, an open-source EHR is another option to consider. Though its capabilities could be limited, it will still enable you to create patient profiles and define treatment plans, automate appointment scheduling, simplify medical billing, and so on.
In psychiatry, transparent communication between the specialist and the patient is crucial, as well as the smooth coordination between the psychiatrist and primary care provider. Electronic health records software facilitates multiple behavioral medicine workflows, including progress notes, outcome reporting, treatment decisions, patient support, documentation, and financial management. But it can also hinder the patient experience and personnel satisfaction if implemented incorrectly. Our experts work closely with clinicians to implement a solution with functionality valuable to your practice, smoothly integrate it with necessary third-party software, and ensure its interoperability with other healthcare solutions.