5 Must-Have Features in Behavioral Health EMR

Mark Fauver
4 min readJan 1, 2021

--

Introduction

Behavioral health is the scientific study of the emotions, behaviors, and biology relating to a person’s mental well-being, their ability to function in everyday life, and their concept of self.

Behavioral Health EHR software are those that make managing your practice much easier but it is important to have the right kind of features in your EMR for it to be successful and make everything efficient for you. Let’s talk about the top 5 features that best EMR for behavioral health needs to have.

  1. DSM-IV Diagnosis codes
  2. Clinical decision support tools
  3. Patient engagement
  4. Specific Treatment Plan Support
  5. Cloud Access

DSM-IV Diagnosis codes

The first thing that we are going to talk about is the DSM-IV diagnostic codes. To facilitate analysis of psychiatric practice patterns and quality of care, it is very important for the EHR software to have this feature. In this particular practice, these codes are very important because when working with the patients, they help the doctors understand the problem their patient has and his patient’s illness. These codes also help them to figure out the best treatment plan for them. Any good EMR software for behavioral health needs to have this feature because it makes doctors’ tasks much easier.

Clinical decision support tools

Moving on to the clinical decision support tools. One of the foundations of behavioral and mental health practice involves the use of behavioral health screening and assessment tools and the close monitoring of patient progress in other care settings. This feature is so important and it helps the medical practice with all the reminders and clinical guidelines. Any behavioral health practice realizes the importance of this tool and always looks for this feature in any EMR that they wish to pick so all the good EMR software for behavioral health must have this feature.

Patient Engagement

Let’s talk about Patient Engagement features and their importance in behavioral health practice. Patient engagement plays a very vital role in this particular practice. Firstly, with the help of patient engagement, the communication between the patient and the provider becomes very easy and smooth. Patients can easily communicate with the provider about their treatment and their medication or whatever they want to talk about. This helps keep the patients motivated and engaged. Patient engagement features should also allow for a way for patients to take an active role in appointment scheduling and offer a user-friendly messaging system. A good Behavioral health EMR software needs to have this feature because it’s the user’s top requirement.

Billing

A lot of doctors lament about having to look over billing when running their own medical practice. As a doctor, it can be very frustrating to have to do the billing yourself because of the fact that as a doctor you simply do not have the time or the expertise to ensure that you are doing a good job with billing. This is why good behavioral health EMR software needs to have excellent billing capabilities. This particular field has a lot going on and it is very important for the therapists to be stress-free which is why the software they install must be able to perform all the tough and difficult tasks. One of the most complex tasks that every medical practice has to perform is billing. This is one feature that an EMR software for behavioral health must-have.

Cloud Access

One thing that is very important for every doctor in a medical practice is that they need their EHR software to be cloud-based which means the documents, patient history, or patient information can be accessed at any time any day. This helps the doctor manage multiple things even if he’s not at work or if he is away. This can help majorly in improving clinical efficiency and productivity. A good behavioral health EMR software must be cloud based which will allow doctors to be connected with their patients even when they are not physically together.

If you want to know most about Behavioral health EMR software, visit Software Finder.

Conclusion

Behavioral health practice has so much going on and it is important for an EHR software to have certain features. The features that we have mentioned are very important for a good behavioral health EHR software to have. They will not only help the practice become more efficient but will also make the work lives of therapists and doctors easy. The best EMR for behavioral health must have these features.

--

--

Mark Fauver
Mark Fauver

Written by Mark Fauver

Working as a marketing consultant in the healthcare industry. Occasionally write and consult for industry related projects

No responses yet