Overview

The idea of a one-size-fits-all solution is a common myth when choosing an EHR for your practice. Providers and practice managers often assume that any EHR can fit their practice’s unique needs, but this isn’t the case. All the EHRs and EMRs are designed differently and cannot cater to the demands of every size of practice. For example, some electronic health records are designed for small practices, while others meet the demands of large practices.

In this blog, we will talk about the Epic EHR system, which is considered best for large practices. This is because large healthcare practices manage patient data, billing, and clinical workflows more complexly as they handle higher patient volumes and diverse medical specialties. Epic EHR is considered best for large practices because of its flexibility, scalability, and wide-ranging capabilities.

Epic EHR system offers solutions for everything from patient scheduling to complex billing needs, making it an invaluable tool for providers who need efficient, integrated, and secure medical software. Let’s explore 7 tested reasons why the Epic EHR system stands out as the best choice for large healthcare practices.

1. Comprehensive Patient Record Management

The success of any Epic EHR system is its ability to provide a complete, seamless patient record. Large healthcare practices often serve thousands of patients with complex medical histories and mutable needs. In this case, a provider requires a health record that can show all the histories in one place to save time and effort. With Epic EMR, providers can view and manage detailed patient records that consolidate data from past visits, diagnostic tests, medications, and treatment plans all in one electronic medical record base.

Key Benefits:

• Holistic View of Patient History
  Epic EHR system gives healthcare providers a comprehensive view of a patient’s entire medical history so they can do accurate and informed decision-making. It eliminates the need to attach third-party connector tools or to juggle among different apps.

• Reduced Redundancy
  When all data is consolidated into a single electronic record, unnecessary tests and duplicate procedures are reduced, which is especially valuable in high-volume practices to save time, effort, and revenue.

• Interoperability
  The Epic EMR system can integrate with other platforms, enabling large practices to share information easily with other healthcare providers. This capability is particularly beneficial for practices that work closely with hospitals, labs, and specialists without the need to buy any extra tools. Epic EHR system also provides an easy integration with RPM tools.

2. Scalability of Epic EHR System for Large Patient Volumes

For large healthcare practices, managing high patient volumes smoothly and reliably is essential. Epic medical software is designed to meet this need by scaling effortlessly to support growing practices without compromising on performance. Epic can easily tackle a large number of patient entries at a time without disturbing its efficiency and speed.

As of 2020, Epic’s infrastructure supported approximately 2.5 million concurrent users, processing around 1.8 billion database accesses per second across all customers. This robust capacity ensures that healthcare organizations can efficiently manage large volumes of patient data simultaneously, facilitating seamless operations even during peak usage periods.

Key Benefits

• Efficient Management of High Patient Volume
  Epic billing system and infrastructure are designed to support a vast amount of patient data, ensuring that even the busiest practices can function without system slowdowns.

• Load Balancing
  Epic’s system architecture includes load-balancing mechanisms that distribute incoming requests across multiple servers. This reduces bottlenecks, allowing the software to process a high number of patient entries without overloading any single part of the system.

• Customizable Modules
  Epic EHR offers numerous modules that allow practices to tailor the system to their specific needs, from primary care to specialty services. For example, Epic OpTime is a module that focuses on perioperative services, which enhances surgical scheduling, preoperative assessments, intraoperative documentation, and postoperative care coordination. Similarly, another module is Epic Beacon Oncology for oncology care. It manages chemotherapy treatment plans, including ordering, scheduling, and administration.

• Future-Proofing
  As a practice grows or expands into new specialties, the Epic EHR system can scale along easily with it, eliminating the need for costly system upgrades or replacements. It even allows easy data transition to avoid any kind of hassle in the process.

• Cloud Integration and Resource Allocation
  Epic also integrates with cloud platforms like Microsoft Azure, allowing the software to expand its resources (storage, processing power) as needed. This flexible cloud setup enables Epic to handle surges in patient data entries without a decline in performance.

3. Advanced Epic Billing System for Revenue Cycle Management

For large practices, keeping track of bills, coding, and revenue cycles is a difficult job that can quickly become too much to handle, leading to rejections. However, the Epic billing system makes these things easier by providing practices with a complete Epic medical billing platform that works perfectly with its EHR features.

Key Benefits

• Unified Patient and Billing Records
  Epic links patient records with billing information, so all data—clinical notes, diagnoses, and treatments—flows directly into the billing system. This connection minimizes manual data entry, reduces errors, and ensures that bills reflect accurate clinical information.

• Automated Billing Workflows
  The Epic billing system automates much of the billing process, from invoicing to claims submission. This reduces administrative work and minimizes errors, so you get paid faster.

• Automated Coding Suggestions
  Epic’s billing system uses AI driven tools that analyze clinical notes and suggest the right codes. This automation ensures correct coding and reduces coding errors that can lead to denials.

• Claim Scrubbing and Validation
  Epic’s system scrubs claims to check for potential errors before submission. It identifies missing information, coding inaccuracies, or other issues, enabling staff to correct them right away. This pre-claim validation lowers the risk of denials and accelerates reimbursement. Epic automates all the steps of claiming, but professional supervision is still necessary to avoid denials due to minor coding or wrong information errors. You can employ professional billers like those at Transcure to ensure a 98% first-pass clean claim rate with Epic EHR.

• Epic Revenue Cycle Management
  Comprehensive Epic revenue cycle management features support each step of the process, from check-in patients to posting payments. Ensuring this comprehensive system, Epic EHR keeps the revenue cycles running efficiently, which is why it is important in big practices with enormous volumes of billing.

• Automated Follow-Up and Denial Management
  Epic medical billing platform automatically flags denied claims, allowing your billing staff to quickly address issues. With automated follow-ups, the system also keeps track of pending claims and manages re-submissions, helping practices recover revenue that might otherwise be lost.

• Comprehensive Financial Reporting
  With Epic’s reporting tools, you can quickly see how your revenue cycle is doing, giving you real-time insights whenever you need them. This lets you spot problems, make smart choices, and boost cash flow by using data to cut down on rejects.

• Enhanced Compliance
  Epic’s billing and coding tools help ensure that the practice stays compliant with HIPAA regulations, reducing the risk of errors or potential audits.

4. Superior Clinical Documentation Tools

In large practices, it is important to quickly and correctly record contacts with patients, evaluations, and treatments. Epic’s clinical recording tools are made for offices that do a lot of work because they are reliable, easy to use, and save time.

Key Benefits

• Speech Recognition Integration
  Epic integrates with various speech recognition tools, including Dragon Medical, allowing providers to dictate notes instead of typing. This saves time and improves accuracy in clinical documentation at the same time. Such features prevent wasting your precious time and eliminate the room for mistakes.

• Templates and Customization
  Epic EHR system offers customizable templates that allow providers to streamline documentation workflows, making it easier for each clinician to follow their preferred approach. With the Epic EHR software, you can create customized templates in order to avoid monotnous data entry and save time and effort.

• Automated Data Entry
  Epic’s AI-powered tools fill in areas instantly based on past data. This saves time and reduces the chance of making mistakes when entering data.

5. Patient Engagement and Portal Features

With the growing demand for digital healthcare solutions, patient engagement tools have become a priority for large practices. Epic EHR system includes robust patient engagement features that help practices keep their patients informed and involved in their healthcare journey.

Key Benefits

• MyChart Patient Portal
  Patient engagement tools, such as Epic’s MyChart platform, help users keep up with their health care. You can make appointments, look at your medical records, see your test results, and send private messages to your doctors through MyChart. That means less phone calls and better ways for patients and their care teams to talk to each other. As a result patients will find it easier, and doctors will feel less stressed. This will make care better for everyone.

• Appointment Scheduling and Reminders
  For offices using the Epic EHR system, automatic schedule notes can help cut down on no-shows and increase patient attendance, saving your practice time.

• Telehealth Integration
  Epic EMR has added video visits straight to its EHR system for the growing need of telehealth services. Through MyChart, patients can do video meetings, which gives them the freedom to get care from home.

6. Data Analytics and Reporting Capabilities

Large healthcare offices can keep track of performance, patient visits, funds, find trends, and improve operating efficiency with the help of data analytics. Epic’s data analytics tools give practices the power to keep an eye on how they’re doing and make decisions based on data that are good for both patients and doctors.

Key Benefits

• Customizable Reporting
  Epic EHR offers a wide range of customizable reports that allow administrators to track key metrics, such as patient volumes, revenue cycles, and clinical outcomes.

• Predictive Analytics
  Epic’s predictive analytics tools help practices anticipate future trends, such as patient demand for specific services, allowing them to allocate resources accordingly.

• Population Health Management
  Epic’s population health tools help practices keep track of the health of large groups of patients by finding risk factors, seeing health trends, and making preventive care better. This is especially helpful for big offices that see people from a wide range of backgrounds.

7. Strong Security and Compliance Standards

As patient data is private and HIPAA rules are strict, security and safety are very important for large healthcare practices. The Epic EHR system is designed with strong security features to keep data safe and make sure that offices follow all government rules.

Key Benefits

• Data Encryption and Access Control
  Advanced security procedures and strict access controls in the Epic EHR system make sure that only authorized staff can see private patient information.

• HIPAA Compliance
  Epic EHR system is fully compliant with HIPAA regulations, making it a trusted choice for large practices concerned with maintaining patient privacy and avoiding costly fines.

• Audit Trails
  Epic healthcare software provides detailed audit trails that allow practices to track who accessed or modified patient records. This is essential for compliance and can be invaluable during internal reviews or external audits.

Future Prospects: AI and Automation in Epic EHR System

Epic is always evolving to incorporate the latest technology, especially in AI and automation. Future updates will bring even more AI-powered tools integration to streamline clinical workflows and documentation and reduce administrative burdens. Epic has already made many partnerships for this purpose which include the partnership with Microsoft Azure and Nuance. It is all about streamlining workflows and clinical processes with AI. With Azure’s GPT-4 AI engine, Epic can give providers new tools to manage patient info and billing more efficiently.

This tech makes Epic’s EHR faster and more user-friendly. GPT-4’s applications in the Epic EHR system range from automating mundane tasks to predictive insights. On the other hand, there is an integration of  Nuance’s DAX, a tool that is a speech-to-text technology that lets providers document patient visits without having to type. Together, these tools will provide a seamless experience for clinical and administrative needs in Epic EHR and EMR.

Conclusion

The Epic EHR system is an all-encompassing solution that helps large healthcare companies handle their care better in every way. When it comes to the specific needs of high-volume offices, Epic EHR is made to handle things like managing a lot of patients, making billing easier, and putting in place strong security measures. Because it has so many advanced features, like automation, predictive insights, and data analytics, it is a very useful tool for better patient care and operations.

Epic EHR provides large healthcare practices with an EHR system that is safe, scalable, and efficient. This system helps them provide high-quality patient care, stay in compliance, and expand as they need to. Epic is also committed to innovation, which means it will stay at the forefront of EHR solutions as healthcare technology changes. This makes it a reliable choice for healthcare providers who want to do well in a market that is always changing and becoming more competitive.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ’s)