In health care, documentation is crucial to ensure accurate and up-to-date record keeping. eMARs, or electronic medication administration records, are a viable way for clinics and medical institutions to go digital. They create medical documentation in electronic health record (EHR) systems by leveraging modern technologies such as radio frequencies and electronic tracking sensors.
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Today, several cutting-edge technologies are helping transform primary care delivery by streamlining and automating workflows. eMARs are taking the medical world by storm, assisting doctors in providing accurate results to patients.
What This Article Covers
What Is an eMAR?
An eMAR is an alternative to paper-based medical charts that serves as a legal documents collector for medical clinics. It creates and saves a record of every medicine administered to a patient over the treatment cycle. It also maintains a stamp of the medical professional’s name who is responsible for a particular patient’s admission.
After the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, federal and private Medicare agencies started migrating to digital solutions to receive incentive payments from the government. During this time, the adoption of eMAR, EMR and EHR solutions skyrocketed.
Digital record-keeping automates the prescribing process for clinics saving valuable time. eMARs can reduce prescription errors by using a barcoding technology that captures every detail minutely. The FDA is working tirelessly to eliminate medical prescription errors to promote better care delivery.
Furthermore, it requires fewer manual data entry tasks and eliminates the need for paper-based documentation. The software also includes integrated quality assurance and auditing tools to ensure all information complies with federal law.
eMARs streamline medical administration with regular data backups. They provide data in the form of charts and graphs to medical practitioners, helping them track patients’ progress better. With an eMAR, patients and clinicians can stay updated about each medicine administered.
Primary Benefits
eMARs help clinics streamline and automate clinical and administrative workflows across locations to improve efficiency. They also play a key part in increasing patient satisfaction and care. These systems come with an intuitive interface and are straightforward to use.
We’ve listed the benefits implementing an eMAR solution will provide your clinic.
Streamline Medication Administration
Optimize medical administration throughout your facility and improve operational efficiency. Automate the mundane and time-consuming manual recording process and free up time for staff to allocate them somewhere else. With reporting and documentation tasks taken care of, medical practitioners can focus more on patients and provide better care.
Reduce Medical Errors
Handwritten medical records are prone to inaccuracies. Factual errors often contribute to incorrect diagnoses and cause problems for doctors and patients. Implementing an eMAR application will automate record keeping of patients’ administered medicine. It reduces documentation errors drastically so you can improve care quality.
Improve Accessibility
Accessibility is the way of the future in health care. With digital systems, easier access to patient files and other documents is the key to success. Many eMARs are compatible with both Android and iOS devices. Clinicians can leverage cloud-based medical forms and documentation to provide care to patients remotely. They also provide your staff access to systems from anywhere, anytime.
Eliminate Downtime
Many eMAR solutions come with an easy-to-operate interface and few implementation requirements. Therefore, the systems are easy to install and operate. Clinics can often get an eMAR solution up and running in a day. In addition, a user-friendly interface helps clinical staff to learn and operate the software in no time.
Manage Time Efficiently
With a user-friendly interface, automated record keeping, better file accessibility and more, eMARs save valuable time for care providers. Efficient time management improves productivity and quality of care delivery.
Adhere to Medical Regulations
An eMAR application ensures that all medical records abide by the rules and regulations of governing bodies. It alters and modifies records and keeps every spring of data adhering to regulations. It also helps clinical staff ensure the six rights of medical data recording — right medication, right time, right documentation, right resident, right dose and right route.
Key Features
An eMAR solution provides features such as reporting, communication management and more. Automated capabilities enable care homes to operate better and more efficiently. Medical staff can use their time better to care for patients’ various needs to increase their satisfaction.
Below, we’ve listed some common eMAR features. Stay tuned.
Alerts
Ensure that nurses and physicians don’t miss a single medical dosage. This feature can help reduce missed dosage counts. Alerts will provide patient details, medicine information and time of dosage to care workers directly, keeping every nurse updated.
Reporting
Creating reports for individual patients can be a daunting and time-consuming ordeal for health care professionals. It keeps them engaged in stressful tasks and creates an enormous pile of papers. With an eMAR, automate the reporting process completely. They can automatically create monthly and weekly reports with patient and medical details, taking the heavy load off nurses’ shoulders.
Notes
Keeping contemporaneous, accurate notes is a must for medical practices. It ensures patient data is up to date and ready for use. eMARs check and keep track of notes created by your medical staff. They catalog each entry and provide them in the hour of need. Set a secure login id and password to protect the notes library.
Audits
Taking care of every detail of a patient report is daunting for medical staff. With an eMAR, medical professionals can eliminate manual data filling as the system integrates data and creates reports on its own. This saves valuable time and helps doctors and nurses administer medicines and care on time.
Automated Scheduling
With digitization altering the operational models of every industrial sector worldwide, health care continues to adopt electronic devices to stay relevant. eMAR software allows patients to schedule appointments without any staff involvement. It ensures that patients can see the available slots, answer several questions about location and specific requirements, and book an appointment from the comfort of their homes.
Communication Management
Communication is the cornerstone of the health care industry. All levels of staff and medical workers must stay in constant touch with each other for real-time updates. An eMAR system helps in internal communication and manages doctor and patient messages. Further, it enables patients to stay in touch with doctors through mobile applications.
Importance
eMARs are an important part of health IT. The primary objective of these systems is to record the medicines administered and to keep health care workers accountable. In addition, it also ensures that care agencies regularly uphold health care laws and regulations.
It improves not only medicine administration but also medicine stock monitoring, operational efficiency and more. It plays a vital role in the future of electronic medical records trends.
The federal government has left no stones unturned in promoting eMAR among the health care community. They encourage care providers to adopt eMARs and enjoy lucrative incentives in return.
Cost Considerations
Today’s medical market is competitive, and many vendors sell eMAR solutions at different prices. As an essential part of buying software, you must take a hard look at the practice and find the underlying gaps. Needless to say that a solution aligned with the unique requirements of your practice will be a winner in the long run.
The price of eMAR software can depend on a lot of aspects. However, you can still get an approximate rate by calculating the number of features, implementation and vendor service costs.
Below are some pricing considerations you must remember to land the best eMAR solution for your clinic.
- Buyers can incur hefty upfront installation fees, especially for on-premise software installation. An on-premise application requires a detailed IT team to review the integration and setup process. Maintaining an IT team in this phase will help you get through smoothly. However, hiring an IT team itself is costly.
- Another considerable cost that most buyers face is software licensing. A free solution will only provide a limited number of features for a fixed tenure. Post that, you will need to pay licensing and upgradation costs to access the flurry of features that an eMAR provides.
- Keep in mind that every software comes with multiple hidden costs. Vendors will charge extra for almost every service, from implementation to additional assistance. Therefore, maintain a list of the services you require that might cost extra.
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Conclusion
While people can often confuse EHR, EMR and eMAR solutions, they offer distinct features and benefits. Unlike other software, eMARs keep health data in line with existing laws and regulations.
If you want to buy an eMAR solution, your best bet is to read this article thoroughly and ask industry experts about their opinion. Take a look at our services to automate your RFI/RFP creation or receive advice from the experts.
What do you look for in an eMAR solution? Let us know your experience in the comments section.