How Can EHR Interoperability Help Boost Your Telemedicine Reimbursement 3X?

What is EHR Interoperability?

The ability to electronically share health records easily is referred to as EHR interoperability. In simple terms, it means secure and transfer of confidential medical records. 

EHR Interoperability is the architecture or specifications that allow it to share information between services for various integrated EHR systems. 

It facilitates smoother workflows, eliminates uncertainty, and increases the consistency of treatment by making the necessary details accessible to the right doctor at the right moment.

Using a telehealth system with interoperability EHR allows doctors to be more efficient, monitor better treatment outcomes, and to interact more easily with patients and with each other. If the healthcare ecosystem continues to adopt healthcare information exchange and Interoperability, telehealth will leverage.

Integrated EHR is the primary telehealth quality metric to ensure you get ROI of telehealth. Furthermore, it prevents billing errors, keeps integrated electronic health records organized, and benefits both patients and physicians.

What are the Standards for EHR Interoperability?

The first is the ability to transport the data safely, and the second is the ability to analyze and use it.

Telehealth CPT codes, also called Current Procedural Terminology codes, ICD-9/ICD-10 codes, and Health and Care Professionals Council (HCPC) standards, must be followed for EHR platforms.

To encourage electronic data interchange, healthcare IT leaders have enabled the use of universal exchange standards for decades. This definition was introduced into law by HIPAA and later evolved in the requirements of HIPAA transactions. 

The transaction legislation was established using the ANSI X12 guidelines and the NCPDP exchange regulations for pharmacy-related transactions. 

With the criteria for healthcare sharing in the HITECH Act, this regulation has facilitated substantial improvement in submitting and receiving interoperability goals. Electronic health records sharing has also been advanced by programs such as the Direct Project and Blue Button.

In the analytics framework area, healthcare information exchange and Interoperability for seamless EHR are essential and interdependent telemedicine requirements.

 The analytics ecosystem can gain immediate benefits by combining health, costing, and financial data with improved patient outcome data.

Meaningful Use and MACRA aims to improve transparency in the healthcare sector, targeted care, boost data gathering, ROI of telehealth, move us into new times, use technologies to monitor our transition to electronic health records and the whole health care framework and collaboration. Technology should ensure that EHR return on investment is seamless.

The EHR can enable the provider to define the regulatory criteria of treatment and the complexities of uploading MACRA-compliant documentation. Still, the eHealth approach seamlessly renders these criteria part of current workflows – fully allowing providers to ensure compliance with limited (or no) effort.

Why is EHR Interoperability Necessary for Telemedicine?

Electronic health records‘ great vision, designed to allow patients to provide better-managed treatment and reduce healthcare costs, could never be accomplished without integrated Interoperability.

Clean claims, timely compensation, rejection rates, and other conventional primary performance measures have been used to monitor medical reimbursement. Rising insurance benefits and broader patient financial accountability transform how stakeholders see efficient management of the revenue cycle.

Healthcare quality is a public-private collaboration that endorses a platform of Interoperability that allows for streamlined sharing between and across networks. It is the chosen mechanism for the safe exchanging of data through EHRs. 

Telemedicine reimbursement is three times enhanced with EHR interoperability by delivering integrated access to all involved networks. The EHR system framework adopters and their patients enjoy smoother data transmission and cost-effective exchange of health data.

Adopting emerging telehealth technology will soon be on an exponential trend, with a demand expected to reach $379 billion by 2024. Integrating EHR intelligence into the telehealth system is becoming increasingly crucial for interoperability healthcare because of this projected growth. 

Healthcare information exchange and EHR technologies provide value-based reimbursement, patient-provider communication, and seamless medical reimbursement to deliver telehealth quality metrics. 

How telemedicine works with EHR integration is going to put forward and leverages evidence and knowledge to improve patient outcomes.

How does EHR Interoperability Benefit the Doctor?

It becomes more advanced when data is shared in a secure environment. Healthcare is a collaborative endeavor, and the effort is assisted by shared learning.

After all, the efficient exchange of knowledge from one doctor to another and, virtually, several health practitioners’ willingness to participate in interactive educational delivery via telehealth platform results in an improved health care delivery system.

EHR is aiding doctors to diagnose patients more efficiently, reduce medical errors, and deliver safer treatment, improving engagement and contact between patients and health care professionals and convenience of health care.

Providers use telehealth to enhance healthcare delivery, access patients in new areas and increase the standard of treatment and patient satisfaction.

How does EHR Interoperability Benefit the Patients?

The data obtained by the primary care physician alerts the emergency room doctor about the life-threatening allergy of the patient so that care can be better managed, even when the patient is unconscious.

EHRs emphasize the patient’s overall health, moving beyond traditional clinical data gathered in the practitioner’s office and including a multidimensional spectrum of patient treatment. 

EHRs are meant to branch out beyond the healthcare organization that gathers and compiles the data initially. They are intended to exchange data with other health care facilities such as hospitals, laboratories, and consultants, so they provide data from all experts engaged in the care of the patient.

Targeted use of EHR data is one of the Telemedicine Implementation Strategy, helpful to decrease inconsistency in clinical outcomes that results in unnecessary costs and inadequate quality of treatment.

 For example, it is possible to use accurate, telehealth quality metrics to determine when costly biological medications may have been incorrectly administered, and when doctors have transfused more blood than clinical recommendations.

EHR Interoperability key to Boosting Telemedicine Reimbursement

When considering an EHR, Interoperability is generally an expensive proposition. Still, it should be at the center of the checklist of specifications for an EHR solution. 

As EHR interoperability is an integral aspect of the government’s Meaningful Use Stage 2 specifications is EHR interoperability. MU Stage 2 influences health care workers’ Medicare payouts. According to the regulations, all service providers who take Medicare and do not follow the rule would have decreased payouts.

Not just this, but for physicians using Electronic Health Records (EHR) Tools for Telemedicine, there is a range of other opportunities. Faster reimbursements are among the significant gains. Reimbursements catalyze for the US government to promote the use of telemedicine in health systems.

Healthcare workers invest an enormous amount of time faxing and manually organizing the sharing of data without Interoperability. When staff is expected to manually abstract details from faxed records, there can be accidental errors when typing the information into the EHR.

It is convenient to integrate electronically exchanged data into the patient’s log, eliminating mistakes and saving employees time when working at an optimum, cost-effective pace.

The complexity surrounding insurance has become one of the critical barriers to clinicians’ universal acceptance of telemedicine. Both commercial and CMS payers have been reluctant to enact structured telemedicine reimbursement policies. 

Therefore, it is a widespread myth that it is impossible to refund providers for telemedicine appointments or possible only at a discounted rate. Both of which make telemedicine commercially unattractive to doctors.

The bottom line is that, based on your state, profession, facilities, and the third party payer, telehealth reimbursement will differ a lot.

Interoperability EHR platforms are not static technologies, and corporations struggle to realize how to determine the optimal use of EHR experience. Ehr’s return on investment is one of the significant EHR interoperability challenges. To boost their value proposition and shorten ROI time, leading EHR vendors are beginning to offer more competitive pricing.

What is the Main Advantage of Interoperability within an Electronic Health Records (EHR) System? 

Telemedicine providers must have Interoperability to achieve EHR integration. 

The essence of Interoperability is integrating the electronic data interchange generated by health plans, health networks, providers, and patients by EHRs, analytical systems, biometric tracking, and other digital systems, and using that data to optimize patient care and supervision. 

The level of treatment, where physicians can optimize the effect of integrated EHR, is Interoperability’s objective.

Businesses behind new attempts to develop protocols are trying to further push the EHR interoperability challenges; their focus includes further sharing of patient information and analytics in real-time and the availability of appropriate health information and patient data to healthcare professionals at the point of treatment.

Customers who have connections to their veterinarians through telemedicine may help ease pet owners’ discomfort while strengthening their faith in their veterinarians. Veterinary telemedicine also saves veterinarians time with more appointments done virtually, proving to be a value-based reimbursement telemedicine service improving many pets’ lives.

Instead of investment in vast numbers of facilities and people, virtual integration in healthcare promotes collaborative work through patient management programs, healthcare reimbursement, and real-time telehealth networking technologies.

Through cost-sharing and risk-sharing frameworks, the virtually interconnected structure aims to connect individual organizations’ core competencies so that these organizations can function as a broader, unified body.