Electronic medical records (EMRs) have transformed the medical world, impacting patient care and day-to-day operations at medical practices across the country.

Regardless of the specialty of your practice, your reputation is always going to be one of the most valuable tools that you have when it comes to attracting new patients. The expansion of technology intersecting with the advancement and growth of the field of medicine means that patients have more choice when it comes time to receive care. In order to ensure that you are maintaining your existing client base while also adding new patients, you need to protect and maintain your reputation. While this may have once been solely about offering the best care possible, times have changed. Whether you feel that you're already doing enough to bolster and protect your practice's reputation or are looking for a crash course in it, take a look at these tips.

Making sure you're using your EHR to increase patient engagement can help you get the most out of your product. While EHRs can help to simplify your practice, you don't want to get to the point where they limit your communication with the patient. According to Physicians Practice, 70 percent of practices have reported a decrease in patient face time after EHR implementation. In order to ensure you're getting the most out of your EHR while maintaining meaningful communication, you may want to try techniques like voice dictation to speed up record creation.

21st Century Cures Act Proposes to Affect HIPAA Privacy Rule, PHI Restrictions, & ONC Certifications

In those bygone days before the rise of the internet and online search engines, people often cracked open phonebooks (remember those?) and turned to the Yellow Pages whenever they needed to find a local business or service (including healthcare). These days, however, very few people use phonebooks anymore (at least, not for locating businesses or finding phone numbers). I would challenge you to find just one person under the age of 20 who remembers ever seeing a phonebook in real life, but that’d just be a monumental waste of your time.

Electronic health records are revolutionizing the healthcare industry with more than 87 percent of physicians either in the process of implementing or already using an EHR throughout their day-to-day routines. More and more, EHRs are the glue that holds medical offices together. Efficient EHRs can significantly impact the quality of patient care, from wait times to quality of doctor consultations. Depending on if the EHR is integrated with a PM, it’s also the foundation for scheduling appointments, billing and other important administrative tasks. Unfortunately, EHRs are not all created equal and healthcare providers are unhappy with their present EHR software.

When you're running any sort of medical practice, regardless of specialty, it's important to focus on the human element of the business. When you spend time thinking about effective patient scheduling techniques, maintaining accurate electronic medical records and optimizing billing processes, it can be far too easy to view your practice as a business first. The truth, though, is that being professionally successful in the medical field is contingent, at least partially, upon maintaining excellent communication in all aspects of your practice. Even if you feel that you've cracked the code, you may want to take a look at these tips for improving communication within your practice:

Here we go again. With nearly five months until the mandated ICD-10 implementation deadline, it appears some lawmakers are championing for yet another delay of the international coding system. Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX), a longtime detractor of ICD-10, has once again proposed a bill that would halt the upcoming compliance deadline. In what amounts to a duplicate of Poe's failed bid to stop ICD-10 back in 2013, the Cutting Costly Codes Act of 2015 aims to “prohibit the Secretary of Health and Human Services form replacing ICD-9 with ICD-10 in implementing the HIPAA code set standards.” Poe is hoping the 2015 version of this bill will receive more consideration from the House than it did two years ago, but as of now it's considered a long shot.