The ROI of Custom EHR Development: How It Saves Money in the Long Run

The introduction of EHR software has changed the way healthcare industry functions in many ways. Here, the generic EHR software systems have a huge role to play in its widespread adoption and making it a common practice in every sense.

However, as the adoption rate increased, the practice using EHR software systems also increased. However, due to its limited functionality and scalability concerns, generic EHR software systems proved to be useful to an extent. To address this scalability and compatibility concern of the healthcare practices, custom EHR software took the mainstage.

The flexibility it provided in operations, workflow, and scalability options proved to be the reason for this sudden rise in popularity. As more and more practices started shifting from generic EHR software to custom EHR software, healthcare providers started to skip the mid-level and directly develop custom EHR software systems with easiness.

However, the higher cost of custom EHR software development proved to be an obstacle in the process. However, a deeper analysis found that the return on investment with custom EHR software development is much greater than with generic EHR software systems.

Let’s uncover the secrets of higher ROI with custom EHR software in this blog below!

The Hidden Costs of Generic EHR Systems

Before getting into the intricacies of a custom EHR software system, let’s first see the hidden costs of generic EHR systems and the reason why they fail to reach the as high ROI mark as custom EHR software systems.

The Inefficiency and Workflow Disruption

The major problem with generic EHR software is that is fails to align with the specific workflows of the clinic or that of the care delivery. As every clinic works in specific pre-defined worflow which is unique to its practice, due to the implementation of generic EHR software, the clinics have to change their workflow.

This change in workflow leads to delays in care delivery and decreases the productivity of healthcare providers, which leads to the lesser generation of revenue and workflow gas in the EHR software.

Limited Customization and Scalability

One of the major reason why healthcare providers are shifting to custom EHR software despite wide range of offerings with generic EHR software is the lack of customization options. Customizations is a crucial part aspect for the growth of the practice and to generate more revenue with the growth of the practice. 

The limited customization limits the EHR system and the healthcare practice to adapt to the changing needs of the practice, which includes its workflow and other intricacies. Limited customization makes the systems limited to scalability, and it impacts the entire practice as the entire EHR system is an integral part of the healthcare practice. In a nutshell, with a generic EHR software system, the scalability of the software and practice is restricted, restricting the overall growth of the practice.

Integration Challeneges

The healthcare industry is one of the most complicated and well-connected industries in the world. Even though healthcare delivery is majorly between patients and providers, other healthcare service providers have a significant role to play in it; such healthcare service providers are in the form of labs, pharmacists, etc. In virtual care delivery landscape, this same coordination is done by the integrations.

Integration with practice management systems can be complex and expensive in generic EHR software systems as they have limited customization options available. This requires a different approach to integrate such healthcare systems in the generic EHR, which is comparatively much easier in custom EHR software.

How Custom EHR Development Saves You Money

Now that we’ve understood how generic EHR software systems fail to generate more revenue after a certain extent, here are some of the ways in which custom EHR software development can help you save money and contribute more to your return on investment.

Improved Efficiency and Productivity

The first advantage that custom EHRs have is that they are curated and aligned with respect to the clinical workflow of the clinic. Solving the way data and workflows in the clinic reduce the time of healthcare providers that is usually spent on data entry and administrative tasks.

Let’s try to understand this with a real-world example. A study shows that healthcare providers spend as much as 34% of their time on EHR doing the repetitive tasks. By automating this tasks, if not 34% the custom EHR software system can reduce the time spent on EHRs by a significant percentage. This way the healthcare providers can spend more time on patient and treat more patients in that given frame of time, resulting in more patients and higher revenue.

Enhanced Patient Care & Reduced Errors

Another reason why custom EHR software systems have a edge over generic EHR software and the reason why these healthcare providers are shifting to it is that it can tailored to specific clinical needs. For instance, custom EHR can be developed for a particular practice with custom templates, dashboards and workflow that suits your practice best. 

This improves data accuracy and reduces the margin of errors in the entire process. This not only drives data-driven healthcare practices but also results in better care practices that directly impact better patient health outcomes.

The reduction errors leads to fewer re-admissions and lower healthcare costs to the patients. This not only contributes to patient loyalty and higher patient satisfaction rate.

Increased Staff Satisfaction and Reduced Turnover

Unlike generic EHR software systems, custom EHRs can be designed as per the likes and comfort of your staff who will actually be using the software. This will not only make the software user-friendly for your practice but the staff will also be satisfied using it and will also not require extensive training sessions every now and then.

Lower staff turnover translates to cost savings in recruitment and onboarding.

Long-term Scalability and Recued Integration Costs 

It is not a secret that as the practice grows, the number of patients will also grow. This will require you to scale your practice and the software as well. By enabling the software to be scalable, it completely eliminates the need for expensive system updates, which are normally not covered in regular software maintenance, support, and updates.

Along with that, by making the software scalable, the need for integrations is also eliminated and the overall IT costs in elimited which again contributes to flexibility and higher scalable options.

Calculating the ROI of Custom EHR Development

Custom EHR software development is expensive compared to generic EHR systems. However, updates, necessary integrations, interoperability challenges, number of features, addition of additional features, and other factors add up to the already recurring subscription cost of the generic EHR software.

On the other hand, with custom EHR software development, you prepare for this before implementing the software system into your healthcare practice. This way you eliminate all the recurring costs that are generally associated with generic healthcare software.

Conclusion

In a nutshell, custom EHR software development surely costs more in the development phase because it gives your practice system flexibility and scalability and eliminates other barriers to integration and interoperability. However, it removes all the necessary additional recurring costs associated with generic EHR software.

In this way, custom EMR software helps healthcare facilities improve their practice and save significant amounts of healthcare expenses. Make a shift and start the process today.