A quality mental health EHR can make all the difference for your mental health practice, regardless of your size and scale.

Gone are the days when the mental and behavioral health industry was considered inferior to other medical specializations. It is today at exciting crossroads and is being finally recognized as an integral facet of personal health. Business organizations are increasingly encouraging employees to seek medical treatment early before certain mental conditions spiral into more extensive health problems. And local governments are also extending similar support for mental health-related issues through public awareness campaigns.

The mental and behavioral health industry is growing at an unprecedented pace. Research suggests that 1 in 5 American adults suffer from a mental health condition. This translates into the fact that more than 40 million people need a mental health specialist. However, only 40 percent of these 40 million people seek mental healthcare. They offer two significant reasons for this trend. One, most clinics are overburdened with existing patients. Secondly, current business models impede the capability of these clinics to render adequate care to more patients. However, this demand is expected to further increase in the coming years.

So, how do providers keep up with this growth pace? The answer lies in effectively deploying behavioral health EHRs. This strategic effort will help them maintain efficiency at the office while escalating the care delivery process and improving patient communication.

If you are a mental health provider, a practical, user-friendly, and scalable EHR will essentially make your life easier. You have plenty of options available at your disposal to shop for your EHR. But you should be well aware of the fact that many of these are bulky and resistant to growth. So, when you’re deciding which EHR to buy for your practice, make sure it is 100 percent reliable and offers customization and integration features to meet the growing needs of your practice. To find the true solution for mental health software requirements that best aligns with your practice, particularly for mental health treatment, anxieties, and beyond, explore true you psych EHR systems.

Several benefits are intended to flow to your practice by merely implementing a behavioral health EHR:

• Improved prescribing – Mental health providers regularly use specific types of prescriptions and medications for their patients. They generally do not use medications that are relevant to other specialties, such as cardiology. Hence, with a specialty-specific mental health EHR, providers can access a specialized list of prescriptions that focus on mental and behavioral health conditions. This considerably simplifies the prescribing process.
• Care coordination – It is a fact that a patient’s mental health directly affects other areas of their health. Hence, mental health providers often rely on coordinated care to treat their patients. They regularly discuss the patient conditions with General Physicians and other specialties. An integrated mental health EHR enables the provider to share patient records with these other providers and ensure the best care is delivered to the patient.
• Integrated billing – Managing billing is amongst the most laborious tasks at any medical practice. In the case of small mental health practice, the billing function can potentially leave the staff overworked and overwhelmed. A unified mental health EHR allows integrating the billing function, thereby simplifying the billing process for mental health providers.
• Data Accuracy – Deploying a mental health EHR can significantly improve the level of accuracy in patient record keeping. Further, it eliminates transcription errors, thereby enhancing data accuracy. Accurate data then leads to accurate diagnosis, precise treatment plans, and hence improved patient outcomes.

Thus, a quality mental health EHR can make all the difference for your mental health practice, regardless of your size and scale. You can let go of your mundane tasks, such as running prior authorizations, documentation, billing, and many more. Instead, you can divert this time to more core activities such as treating the patients and delivering quality patient care.