Good Processes Drive Success. A Good EHR Drives Good Processes At their best, well-designed processes can make work easier and organizations more efficient. At their worst, poorly designed processes can make even relatively simple tasks frustratingly difficult to accomplish and sink productivity. Behavioral Health and Human Services organizations are extremely process-driven, with a multitude of … Read more
Behavioral Health Organizations Can Reduce Clinician Burnout With the Right Clinical Documentation Tools Clinician burnout has become a serious problem, threatening the health of individual providers, compromising client outcomes, and limiting productivity. Burnout was on the rise before the COVID-19 pandemic, and it has only persisted since then. What is clinician burnout? Generally, burnout relates … Read more
CCBHCs can benefit from the features and functionalities offered by a comprehensive EHR platform The impressive growth in Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinics (CCBHCs) highlights the need for behavioral health and human services EHRs that can effectively integrate a variety of providers and services, capture and report on key metrics, and enable providing services remotely. … Read more
For behavioral health providers, offering telehealth services has never been easier. Federal health officials have relaxed many HIPAA rules to encourage providers to offer more telehealth services during the COVID-19 pandemic.
This is good news for behavioral health providers who have been wanting to launch telehealth services but are concerned about staying compliant with HIPAA rules. Here is what the policy changes, including increased HIPAA flexibility, mean for your practice.
Innovation in healthcare technology, from EHR software to videoconferencing software to patient monitoring devices, has contributed to significant growth in telehealth. More recently, both physical and behavioral health providers have offered telehealth to their clients to reduce in-person and prevent viral spread during the COVID-19 public health emergency. Because of this, the U.S. federal government has encouraged more providers to adopt and use telehealth appropriately.
However, many behavioral health providers had not yet implemented a telehealth program when the COVID-19 emergency began. Behavioral health organizations may be concerned about the financial or time costs of adding telehealth solutions and training staff. Providers may be concerned about whether telehealth solutions can adequately protect client privacy and data. Fortunately, there are many methods and resources for addressing these concerns.
One growing trend in the business side of healthcare has been the combination of payer organizations and healthcare providers to create entities known as “payviders.” The idea of a payvider first originated in the 1990s. Some longstanding examples of payviders include California-based Kaiser Permanente or Pennsylvania-based Geisinger Health System. Other payviders have emerged in recent … Read more
On Thursday, March 19, 2020, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker announced an executive order to expand telehealth services in the state of IL in response to COVID-19. As the outbreak of the virus continues to grow in our communities, it is important that we practice social distancing, which is maintaining a safe distance of at least … Read more
President Donald Trump signed into law the “Coronavirus Preparedness and Response Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2020” on Friday, March 6, after it passed the U.S. Senate by a vote of 96-1. This bill provides $8.3 billion in emergency funding to help U.S. researchers and healthcare providers address the outbreak of COVID-19.
Telehealth, also called telemedicine, is the practice of using technology to provide healthcare remotely. When used for behavioral health, such as psychiatric evaluations or talk therapy sessions, it may also be called telepsychiatry.
Telehealth or telepsychiatry usually involves the direct interaction between a provider and a client, but the term may also be used for communications and consultations between providers.
