Common challenges of mobile EHR and how mobile workforce management can help
Mobile EHR optimizes provider access to electronic medical records, but it can’t account for the full range of modern healthcare operations.
Consider how different staff roles interact with a mobile EHR. The system contains information about everything from patient history to lab results to upcoming appointments—but a triage nurse isn’t going to schedule a follow-up outpatient appointment, and a surgeon isn’t going to process insurance information for billing. An effective mobile EHR benefits all providers and staff, but it doesn’t have the infrastructure to manage the full range of operational tasks, many of which are siloed, asynchronous, or specialized.
That’s where mobile workforce management (MWM) technology comes in: designed for coordinating cross-functional efforts, built for mobile workers, and using intelligent automation, it is the missing link between the medical data contained in mobile EHR and the range of tasks that data informs. MWM software makes this possible by resolving some of mobile EHR’s most common challenges, including:
1. Duplicative, disparate information
Multiple care settings may result in the creation of multiple electronic health records for a single patient, meaning the medical histories associated with these various settings may be inaccurate or incomplete. This requires healthcare workers to spend time to rectify disparate and sometimes conflicting sources of data into a single workflow, a frustrating inefficiency that poses risks to care delivery.
How mobile workforce management helps: By leveraging interoperability (linking platforms that are already compatible) and integration (leveraging APIs to translate data across incompatible platforms), MWM unifies previously disparate EHR information to a single source of truth. It also makes that data transparent and accessible to a range of care providers regardless of their location, ensuring their efforts complement rather than contradict one another.
2. Lack of collaborative workflows
Mobile EHRs can’t account for every possible configuration of care, which makes it difficult to create end-to-end workflows for mobile and distributed care settings, such as home healthcare. In these settings, where a patient’s team of providers are less likely to interact with each other face-to-face, EHRs lack a shared workspace for providers to coordinate. This risks gaps and lags in care delivery as different stakeholders address separate aspects of the patient’s care plan.
How mobile workforce management helps: With its user-friendly communication tools, patients and providers can have meaningful dialogue. MWM provides a secure, centralized setting to document requests for help, second opinions, or follow-ups. It also facilitates creating custom forms and personalized workflows that meet the unique needs of home health and mobile health teams.
3. Mobile accessible, but not mobile-first
Though it’s built to be accessible from a smartphone or tablet, mobile EHR is still an electronic reproduction of a paper process, which means it often lacks a mobile-first UI. Working with mobile EHR can be clunky, particularly since EHR wasn’t originally designed with smartphones and tablets in mind. And with its basis in traditional charting, EHR doesn’t consider the unique concerns of mobile healthcare, like travel times, location tracking, or secure connectivity.
How mobile workforce management helps: Optimized for the experiences of working from a mobile device as well as mobile healthcare delivery, MWM software accounts for many unique worker needs that mobile EHR doesn’t. Its UI is streamlined to enable easy adoption by healthcare workers outside of clinical settings, and it includes dispatching and route optimization that help schedulers and providers deliver efficient, timely care in the field. It also includes real-time tracking to ensure worker and patient safety, keep both parties updated about changes, and proactively adjust schedules when appointments run long.
4. EHR wasn’t built for healthcare operations management
Because electronic medical records were designed to bring clinical documentation into regulatory compliance, they aren’t often interoperable with the administrative platforms that drive healthcare operations management—nor do they afford much visibility for performance analysis or process optimization.
How mobile workforce management helps: MWM software APIs integrate with mobile EHR apps, aggregating siloed data to improve several key healthcare operations, including scheduling providers and equipment, dispatching mobile workers effectively, centralizing communications, reducing manual administrative processes that eat up clinical time, documenting insurance and billing, and even informing staff retention and recruitment. With the ability to run data analysis on workforce KPIs (e.g. utilization of home healthcare workers), MWM drives strategic improvements that deliver better patient experiences and a higher quality of care.
EHR is the system of record for a patient’s health history, care plan, and test results. But MWM enables the mobile EHR to do more: it creates a place where provider and patient availability, preferences, skills, certifications, locations, communications, and schedules come together in real-time. It leverages automations and AI assistance to reduce redundant work, manual processes, and human error in clinical work. On the patient side, it delivers a more consistent and high-quality patient experience and empowers patients to participate actively in their own care.
Breaking down silos, delivering more care
When the two systems are connected, mobile workforce management significantly broadens the scope of what mobile EHR can achieve:
- Providers are more appropriately matched to patients based on a range of criteria beyond just their relevant specialties and credentials. MWM can also factor in patient preferences documented within EHR, like provider gender or language skills. MWM allows providers to rank their job matching criteria and adjust as needed.
- Scheduling becomes faster, easier, and more reliable. MWM software’s improved accuracy and real-time tracking means patients experience shorter wait times, more reliable start times, and more agile providers when conditions change.
- Communication is not only centralized, but simplified. Patients can get SMS messages for appointments, reminders, and updates. MWM can trigger real-time updates to patients and providers as clinical data populates within mobile EHR, care plans evolve, or scheduling needs change. Schedule changes require less effort from providers, schedulers, and dispatchers thanks to AI and custom automations.
- Healthcare workers arrive better prepared for appointments, equipped with the resources they need, and ready to spend more time delivering care to patients in a range of settings.
The integration of MWM software with mobile EHR synchronizes once-disparate teams on site and in the field: patients, providers, administrators, and IT become woven together through a single source of truth to deliver the best possible patient experience while optimizing operational outcomes. This enhanced coordination is vital to every setting in the continuum of care. But as more and more patients receive care in outpatient and home settings, it’s become particularly critical to mobile healthcare workers.
