by Mike Lardieri, LCSW on July 30, 2024
Low adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) in behavioral health has historically been attributed to multiple factors, from lack of financial incentives and technical limitations that restrict the ability to meet the field’s unique needs to confidentiality concerns and staff and provider hesitancy to learn another new platform.
Identify technology competencies that will best serve your behavioral health organization with our guide, The Ultimate Guide to Behavioral Health EHR Selection.
Fortunately, two pieces of currently proposed legislation — the Behavioral Health Information Technology (BHIT) Coordination Act and BHIT Now Act — could offer $350 million in EHR implementation financing over a multiyear span, potentially expanding the scope of the technology’s use in this field nationwide. This good news comes at an exciting time, when advanced technology like artificial intelligence (AI) is being used to create custom-built features that hold numerous benefits for providers serving clients with mental health and substance use disorders or people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD).
Given these developments, if your organization doesn’t have an EHR or is unhappy with its current platform, now would be an ideal time to research the best EHR for behavioral health. Part of this research should include finding an EHR with the capabilities that provide a competitive edge for today’s challenges and the emerging innovations that promise to add value in the future.
Here are some of the most noteworthy features to look for.
1. AI diagnosis and care optimization tools
The immense potential of AI for EHRs is most often realized in the time savings it brings and the predictive assistance that machine learning offers providers. With a full complement of AI-backed features, a behavioral health practice can accelerate and enhance care and support.
Since accurate client assessments are complicated by subjective interpretations of emotions and life events, those tasked with researching a new platform should seek an EHR that leverages objective AI diagnosis support. This can not only help uncover hard-to-see symptoms in provider notes, but it can also connect them with a potential diagnosis. Contextualizing client challenges likewise takes a leap forward with features that can identify and highlight social determinants of health (SDOH) and health-related social needs (HRSN) raised by clients.
See Core Solutions’ offerings:
Core Clinician Assist: Symptom Tracking
Core Clinician Assist: HRSN Tracking
2. Support for evidence-based practices and clinical decision-making
As value-based care places more emphasis on achieving positive, measurable outcomes, it’s crucial for providers to use proven, evidence-based practices and search for solutions that strengthen their clinical decision-making. The best EHR for behavioral health will supply both without disrupting the user’s preferred workflow.
For example, providers should be able to track client progress within the EHR, using tools like the PHQ-9 questionnaire. They should also be able to look at a graph of a client’s scores over time to determine if they’re making progress and adjust the treatment plan as needed — or, for the IDD population, make improvements to the life plan as the client grows older and their needs evolve. The solution you chose should also track vital signs for clients like HbA1c scores, BWI, and blood pressure.
Templates that reflect common behavioral health workflows should be integrated into the system and be customizable to enable more efficient chart evaluation, follow-ups, medication management, and more.
3. Versatility amid a changing reimbursement landscape
Providers participating in value-based reimbursement contracts with payers must conduct target costing and model risk. As they — and providers working under fee-for-service contracts — offer services and negotiate rates, they also need to be able to determine margins and profitability. All of this is immensely simplified with EHR interfaces that provide a clear view of the most up-to-date data.
The client scheduling system should also be embedded in the platform and capture appropriate billing data from the scheduler. This kind of process streamlining is essential to keeping large volumes of claims moving. The best EHR for behavioral health will provide documentation prompts and automatically carry over session information from the scheduler and progress notes so the practice can generate an accurate and complete claim. The ability to generate clean claims, which can be supported by AI that reviews numerous iterations of rules before a claim is completed and submitted to improve clean claims, also helps achieve prompt payment and increased cash flow. <
4. Risk identification and triaging
Risk identification is critical in behavioral health, but it’s usually derived from claims or encounter data. Providers should be able to develop a risk model using data available in their EHR. With the right technology, providers can set risk scores using past suicide attempts, comorbidities, or other parameters, and the system should be able to alert providers to clients who need to be triaged for immediate care and appropriate follow-up. Risk stratification also allows the organization to adjust resources to those most in need of care.
5. Embedded telehealth/telemedicine
Even when in-person healthcare visits are available, many patients — including those with the greatest needs for care — still choose telemedicine, according to a study. These findings were not impacted by most socioeconomic factors like race, ethnicity, income, or education, indicating that telehealth needs to be prioritized and embedded into behavioral health EHRs to reduce the number of times clinicians need to switch between systems or troubleshoot — time that can be better spent with a client and supporting more clients. Streamlining navigation provides a more seamless experience for clients and providers who have become comfortable with the EHR.
6. Enhanced business intelligence (BI) capabilities
To improve long-term outcomes and organizational performance, as well as better manage costs to support viability, the best EHR for behavioral health must be able to help enhance operations before and after a provider renders services.
This starts with seeing a comprehensive picture of a client’s encounters across all providers to better assess treatment needs for mental health or substance use disorders or the best ways to engage those in the IDD population. An AI-supported solution can record provider-client sessions and use natural language processing (NLP) to data mine symptoms, all while saving time so providers can devote themselves more to direct care.
Anomaly detection can also review client progress notes, but for a larger purpose: highlighting issues that could influence a negative outcome — like a medication overdose — or patterns in client no-shows that could point to scheduling inefficiencies.
When reporting on outcomes or performance data, it’s imperative to track and analyze the metrics that matter most to the organization using them. These can include clinician performance, claims denial management, or shifts in population health. A behavioral health EHR must make analytics reports available in real time and have role-based access rules for confidentiality.
Find the Right EHR for Your Behavioral Health Organization
The best behavioral health EHR for your practice will scale alongside your growth, enabling optimal performance, and continually add new features that take advantage of technological advances. This is what you get with the Cx360 EHR by Core Solutions — and much, much more. To view the features and customization capabilities of Cx360, schedule a demo today.
