The Statistics on Hospital Consolidation Trends

Rising costs of maintaining electronic health records (EHR) have caused the number of hospital consolidations to sky rocket. With 102 mergers and purchased transactions announced in the U.S. for 2016, this trend is accelerating for reasons that are apparent. For providers, it is becoming an increasingly challenging environment to stay afloat as a small hospital or medical practice. The use of electronic health systems often require expensive and specialized expertise that are costly and often exceed small medical centers’ budgets.

Why Switch to EHR

Electronic health records are now standard in medical facilities and benefit by keeping track of data, identifying when patients are due for checkups and overall quality of care in practice. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act requires all public and private healthcare providers to adopt meaningful use of electronic medical records to be eligible to receive benefit payments.

Meaningful use of electronic health records have allowed hospitals to have more efficient staff dedicated to helping patients. By using optical character recognition (OCR) for health records, medical staff are able to search through a patient’s health history in a fraction of the time. OCR allows staff to perform simple, instant keyword searches to obtain specific patient information needed. Improved employee efficiency from OCR allows for staff to focus on patient care and improve turnaround times on diagnoses, lab results, and other patient communications.

In addition, file compression helps small healthcare providers remain competitive. Reduction of storage and bandwidth requirements from file compression can leave room for budgets to be used in other areas of the hospital. Smaller file sizes make medical records easier to share, store, and work with. Further, watched folders allow for files to get compressed with minimal supervision, enabling staff to spend less time managing documents and more time treating patients.

Your Way To Affordable EHR

File compression, optical character recognition and automated watched folders could prevent your organization from falling into forced consolidation or bankruptcy by improving staff efficiency and reducing costs as the institution grows. Download your free trial of PDF Compressor to experience how to adopt meaningful use of EHR.