Medical companies, such as providers of medical services, products, and software, as they grow, may need to automate internal and external business processes, and in particular, processes related to patient care. This may be needed to ensure competitiveness (to make their services faster and more reliable) and may be considered trendy during the COVID-19 pandemic.
That is why these organizations should think about integrating the Patient Portal with the EHR. We will talk about this below using the example of the AllScripts EHR.
What Is Allscripts EHR?
First, we should understand what Allscripts is used for. In a nutshell, Allscripts is one of the most popular software vendors for medical and healthcare organizations of all sizes. In particular, this vendor provides opportunities for digitalizing patient records through EHR (electronic health record software).
Thanks to this, document management in such institutions becomes easier (primarily due to the centralization of access to records), quality of care, and patient satisfaction are improved. In the long run, introducing this type of software provides medical institutions with increased competitiveness in the market and high customer confidence.
Allscripts EHR Features That Will Complement the Patient Portal
A patient portal is a secure online web service that provides patients with convenient, 24/7 access to personal health information, such as recent doctor visits, discharge summaries, medications, etc. These web services can be integrated into global solutions, such as medical center software.
Allscripts EHR has a separate Patient Portal module that offers its clients several functions at once. However, using this module is not always a good idea, as its functionality may be limited or not flexible enough for some healthcare organizations. Therefore, you should consider the Allscripts EHR integration option in the configuration you need. Let’s look at the main features of Allscripts EHR in detail below.
Personal health record
This feature is fundamental in the Patient Portal. Patients get access to their medical history, health insurance plan, services provided by a particular medical facility, etc.
Online pre-registration
Instead of making an appointment with a doctor over the phone, patients can do this online through the Allscripts EHR management system.
Online appointments
Another extremely useful feature is online meetings with patients, which make it possible to eliminate the need for calls and, in general, make customer service in medical centers more transparent and convenient.
Online bill payments
Save your patients from having to carry bank cards or cash with them with an in-built online billing feature. You will allow them to pay directly through the EHR (including the option of regular payments) and avoid the possibility of losing clients because they don’t have cash at the time. Also, this feature helps to calculate and plan their budget more efficiently.
Online prescriptions
To reduce paperwork for your doctors, you can use this feature that generates dynamic prescriptions for specific patients.
Patient requests processing
With this feature, you can replace non-urgent phone calls with an in-built HIPAA-compliant, SSL-based online communication tool.
Ask a doc consulting
This allows you to establish online communication with patients, replacing some of the live meetings and almost all phone calls. In fact, this is a tool for remote interactions between doctors and patients, where the latter can receive qualified assistance in response to complaints about well-being.
Lab results reporting
Instead of asking your patients to pick up their lab results in person, you can provide them with a more convenient and cost-effective digital version.
Pros and Cons of Allscripts EHR Implementation For Patient Portal
So, what are the pros and cons of Allscripts EHR? Read below.
Pros
Let’s begin with the benefits of Allscripts’ electronic health records integrations with patient portals.
Increased patient satisfaction
Thanks to integrating an Allscripts EHR system into patient portals, your patients can receive qualified assistance online at any time and in any place where there is an Internet connection. It also simplifies the management of patient requests, as it is now centralized, and reduces the hassle of queuing in offline waiting rooms.
Automated notifications
After the completion of the Allscripts EHR integration process, your medical staff and doctors will be able to contact patients online directly through the portal. Also, here you can set up automatic mailing, such as reminders of an upcoming visit to the doctor, diagnostic results, notifications about the need to make a payment, etc.
Seamless user experience
This EHR allows you to significantly expand the functionality of your website, creating an immersive user experience. Also, you can tell your patients about your new services, specialists who have appeared in your staff of doctors, discounts and promotions, etc.
Free marketing support
To maximize your profits with Allscripts EHR, you can use the training materials provided by this vendor to effectively promote your healthcare business with the best digital marketing techniques.
Need help with AllScripts integration?
Contact Langate todayCons
Allscripts EHR implementation into patient portals also has several cons. Let’s take a look at them.
Lack of customization
As one of the largest EHR solution providers on the market, Allscripts may not be customizable enough for some helper organizations. In particular, you may experience some difficulties when interacting with VIP clients.
High cost to use
This EHR tends to be high priced for maintenance and upgrades. Also, due to the specifics of contractual obligations, migration to a new EHR can be quite expensive.
4 Steps of Allscripts EHR Integration Into Patient Portals
Now it’s time to learn how to implement an Allscripts EHR into patient portals through API.
Consider the requirements of API integration
Before proceeding with the steps of Allscripts EHR integration into patient portals, you must ensure that this EHR you choose is compatible with your main software. You also need to check if the version of your software is out of date. To do this, you may need to contact your main software vendor’s support team.
Receive a unique API key
Another step that precedes the actual execution of the stages to integrate Allscripts EHR into patient portals is to obtain a unique API key. You may need to contact your main software vendor’s support team to do this.
Check available EHR data
You will need to select the appropriate EHR configuration that best suits your business requirements. In particular, you will have to check the available data categories, such as inpatient care, outpatient care, pharmacy, and enrollment, to ensure that the integration is available for all of these categories. In this way, you will get a guarantee that after the integration process is completed, EHR will process all the business data you need.
Test the upgraded system and complete the integration
At this stage of the Allscripts EHR implementation process, you can use your API key to perform the integration. After it is completed, you will need to check if all functions work as you planned, and only after that, launch your updated solution into mass use.
Note that depending on the main software, the integration procedure may have its own nuances, so to ensure its success and the absence of errors, it is better to seek help from experts.
Price of Allscripts EHR Implementation
Allscripts has fairly flexible pricing and offers several plans to clients depending on business requirements and available budget. For example, the basic plan starts at $150. As for the cost of Allscripts EHR system integration services, they can be as high as $2,000. You should remember that before integration, you will need to migrate the database, which also entails additional costs (the migration procedure has a starting cost of $2,000 for 1,000 records).
Consider Langate Your Trusted Partner
If you want to make your integration with this EHR smooth and in the shortest time, you’d better find a trusted technology partner. In particular, you can contact us at Langate. We have over 20 years of experience in creating cutting-edge, standard-compliant digital solutions for the healthcare sector, helping companies reimagine their products with new, advanced technologies and features. Let’s take a look at how we apply our skills in practice.
Simplifying data integration in healthcare
Recently, we were contacted by Approved Admissions, a healthcare data verification service that automatically tracks changes to Medicare, Medicaid, and HMO data and provides relevant eligibility information.
The problem with this service was that many platforms in the modern healthcare system receive and store data in different ways. In this regard, the company turned to us to create a solution to increase productivity and provide access to the system for various medical institutions from any device, which would be free from the problems of big data exchange.
During the work on the Approved Admissions project, our experts (there were six specialists in the team) faced the difficulties of integration and cross-platform compatibility of medical data.
To eliminate them and obtain an effective digital solution, we used the following technology stack:
- Server-side
- ASP.NET MVC 4e
- NHibernate 3
- Windows Services
- SQL Server 2014
- WEB API
- Quartz.NET
- Microservices
- RabbitMQ
- Enterprise Service Bus
- Client-side
- jQuery
- Angular 1.6
- Metronic Theme
- Highcharts
- Testing
- VSTest
- Nunit
It took us only six months to complete this healthcare app. After our collaboration, the company has grown its customer base from a dozen to over 700 healthcare organizations and raised transaction volumes from a thousand daily to over a million monthly.
Final Thoughts
We hope that now you know how to integrate Allscripts EHR into patient portals and can make an informed decision about whether you need this integration at all. If you are already searching for specialists who would cost-effectively and error-free integrate with Allscripts EHR, feel free to contact us.
To sum up the above, let’s answer the frequently asked questions related to the Allscripts EHR integration into patient portals.
