Why Mobile EHR Needs Mobile Workforce Management

January 5, 2025

Mobile electronic health record (EHR) apps make relevant health data available on providers’ mobile devices. But mobile EHR and electronic medical record (EMR) systems weren’t created with the complexities of today’s healthcare landscape in mind. 

While a mobile EHR enables secure access to patient health information, it doesn’t support the continuity of care across different care settings and providers, nor day-to-day administrative operations like scheduling, billing, and revenue cycle management. 

Whether it’s a doctor moving from room to room in a hospital, an on-call provider receiving an after-hours page, or a home health worker traveling from one patient to another, healthcare professionals need to access patient information from where they are. As inpatient, outpatient, mobile, and virtual healthcare become more collaborative, it’s vital to have mobile-first systems that bridge these settings to provide an optimal patient experience. 

Mobile workforce management (MWM) technology extends what mobile EHR can do: it streamlines administrative tasks, coordinates care team schedules, simplifies communication, and enables mobile-friendly workflows and forms. 

What is mobile EHR?

Mobile EHR applications give healthcare teams secure access to patient data from mobile devices like tablets or smartphones.

In addition to organizing traditional medical chart data such as medical history, lab test results, and prescriptions, mobile EHR apps centralize communications among care teams, providers, and patients. Many EHRs also include (or integrate with) a clinical decision support system (CDSS), which offers valuable guidelines and reminders for clinical decision-making. Mobile EHR access is designed to ensure the privacy and security of protected health information in accordance with regulations like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). 

When patient data and clinical support systems are available on the go, providers can deliver more effective, timely, and coordinated care. This improves the quality and consistency of care across inpatient, outpatient, home healthcare, and telehealth care settings.

What are the benefits of mobile EHR?

As the digital transformation of healthcare continues, mobile EHR is essential to patient experience and provider efficiency across the complete continuum of care. 

Key benefits of mobile EHR include: 

  • Improved care coordination – Centralizing patient communication in one platform improves continuity of care, ensuring smoother transitions between care settings and providing mobile healthcare workers access to the most current patient data.
  • Timely, transparent information – Care plans are readily accessible to patients and provider teams, with timely documentation that syncs to EHR across the continuum of care, regardless of physical location of patients and providers or their access to internet connectivity.
  • Consistent clinical documentation – Charting, imaging, lab results, correspondence, care plans, and medication management are digitized, synced in real-time, and accessible from one virtual location. 
  • Improved medication management – Centralized documentation and real-time care plan updates prevent dangerous medication management errors that can occur when patients transition between care settings. Mobile EHR provides critical transparency to new providers as they enter the continuum of care: they can view medical history, discharge orders, and past treatment plans. 
  • Robust data analytics and reporting – Data gathered from individual patients through wearable devices or remote patient monitoring (RPM) is continuously collated in mobile EHR apps,  enabling more timely clinical recommendations. Aggregate patient data can also be organized, anonymized, and studied to inform strategic operations management.
  • Improved patient engagement – Patient portals help individuals take a more active role in their care by providing easy access to their own health records. They can schedule in-person and telemedicine appointments, view provider-recommended resources, and communicate with their care teams right from the mobile app.
  • Optimal administrative performance – Mobile EHR populates provider schedules with accurate patient data, documents insurance coverage, consolidates medical history for accurate charge capture, and documents the completion of appointments and procedures in order to trigger billing tasks, improving revenue cycle management. 

Mobile EHR is essential to providing a higher quality of care while preserving revenue—but without the integration of mobile workforce management (MWM), its full range of benefits can’t be realized. MWM makes EHR data more accessible and actionable for healthcare providers in the field. It supports more accurate, real-time decision making and resource allocation, which provides a better patient experience and greater operational success than a mobile EHR alone.

Common challenges of mobile EHR and how mobile workforce management can help

Mobile EHR optimizes provider access to electronic medical records, but it can’t account for the full range of modern healthcare operations. 

Consider how different staff roles interact with a mobile EHR. The system contains information about everything from patient history to lab results to upcoming appointments—but a triage nurse isn’t going to schedule a follow-up outpatient appointment, and a surgeon isn’t going to process insurance information for billing. An effective mobile EHR benefits all providers and staff, but it doesn’t have the infrastructure to manage the full range of operational tasks, many of which are siloed, asynchronous, or specialized. 

That’s where mobile workforce management (MWM) technology comes in: designed for coordinating cross-functional efforts, built for mobile workers, and using intelligent automation, it is the missing link between the medical data contained in mobile EHR and the range of tasks that data informs. MWM software makes this possible by resolving some of mobile EHR’s most common challenges, including:

1. Duplicative, disparate information

Multiple care settings may result in the creation of multiple electronic health records for a single patient, meaning the medical histories associated with these various settings may be inaccurate or incomplete. This requires healthcare workers to spend time to rectify disparate and sometimes conflicting sources of data into a single workflow, a frustrating inefficiency that poses risks to care delivery. 

How mobile workforce management helps: By leveraging interoperability (linking platforms that are already compatible) and integration (leveraging APIs to translate data across incompatible platforms), MWM unifies previously disparate EHR information to a single source of truth. It also makes that data transparent and accessible to a range of care providers regardless of their location, ensuring their efforts complement rather than contradict one another.

2. Lack of collaborative workflows

Mobile EHRs can’t account for every possible configuration of care, which makes it difficult to create end-to-end workflows for mobile and distributed care settings, such as home healthcare. In these settings, where a patient’s team of providers are less likely to interact with each other face-to-face, EHRs lack a shared workspace for providers to coordinate. This risks gaps and lags in care delivery as different stakeholders address separate aspects of the patient’s care plan. 

How mobile workforce management helps: With its user-friendly communication tools, patients and providers can have meaningful dialogue. MWM provides a secure, centralized setting to document requests for help, second opinions, or follow-ups. It also facilitates creating custom forms and personalized workflows that meet the unique needs of home health and mobile health teams.

 

3. Mobile accessible, but not mobile-first

Though it’s built to be accessible from a smartphone or tablet, mobile EHR is still an electronic reproduction of a paper process, which means it often lacks a mobile-first UI. Working with mobile EHR can be clunky, particularly since EHR wasn’t originally designed with smartphones and tablets in mind. And with its basis in traditional charting, EHR doesn’t consider the unique concerns of mobile healthcare, like travel times, location tracking, or secure connectivity. 

How mobile workforce management helps: Optimized for the experiences of working from a mobile device as well as mobile healthcare delivery, MWM software accounts for many unique worker needs that mobile EHR doesn’t. Its UI is streamlined to enable easy adoption by healthcare workers outside of clinical settings, and it includes dispatching and route optimization that help schedulers and providers deliver efficient, timely care in the field. It also includes real-time tracking to ensure worker and patient safety, keep both parties updated about changes, and proactively adjust schedules when appointments run long.

4. EHR wasn’t built for healthcare operations management

Because electronic medical records were designed to bring clinical documentation into regulatory compliance, they aren’t often interoperable with the administrative platforms that drive healthcare operations management—nor do they afford much visibility for performance analysis or process optimization. 

How mobile workforce management helps: MWM software APIs integrate with mobile EHR apps, aggregating siloed data to improve several key healthcare operations, including scheduling providers and equipment, dispatching mobile workers effectively, centralizing communications, reducing manual administrative processes that eat up clinical time, documenting insurance and billing, and even informing staff retention and recruitment. With the ability to run data analysis on workforce KPIs (e.g. utilization of home healthcare workers), MWM drives strategic improvements that deliver better patient experiences and a higher quality of care. 

EHR is the system of record for a patient’s health history, care plan, and test results. But MWM enables the mobile EHR to do more: it creates a place where provider and patient availability, preferences, skills, certifications, locations, communications, and schedules come together in real-time. It leverages automations and AI assistance to reduce redundant work, manual processes, and human error in clinical work. On the patient side, it delivers a more consistent and high-quality patient experience and empowers patients to participate actively in their own care.

Breaking down silos, delivering more care

When the two systems are connected, mobile workforce management significantly broadens the scope of what mobile EHR can achieve: 

  • Providers are more appropriately matched to patients based on a range of criteria beyond just their relevant specialties and credentials. MWM can also factor in patient preferences documented within EHR, like provider gender or language skills. MWM allows providers to rank their job matching criteria and adjust as needed. 
  • Scheduling becomes faster, easier, and more reliable. MWM software’s improved accuracy and real-time tracking means patients experience shorter wait times, more reliable start times, and more agile providers when conditions change. 
  • Communication is not only centralized, but simplified. Patients can get SMS messages for appointments, reminders, and updates. MWM can trigger real-time updates to patients and providers as clinical data populates within mobile EHR, care plans evolve, or scheduling needs change. Schedule changes require less effort from providers, schedulers, and dispatchers thanks to AI and custom automations.
  • Healthcare workers arrive better prepared for appointments, equipped with the resources they need, and ready to spend more time delivering care to patients in a range of settings. 

The integration of MWM software with mobile EHR synchronizes once-disparate teams on site and in the field: patients, providers, administrators, and IT become woven together through a single source of truth to deliver the best possible patient experience while optimizing operational outcomes. This enhanced coordination is vital to every setting in the continuum of care. But as more and more patients receive care in outpatient and home settings, it’s become particularly critical to mobile healthcare workers. 

Doing more with mobile EHR + mobile workforce management

An effective mobile EHR makes a big difference—and paired with the right mobile workforce management software, it’s a game-changer for both providers and patients.

Skedulo’s MWM software enables healthcare providers to schedule, manage, engage, and analyze their mobile workforce more effectively. The Skedulo Pulse app makes it easy to see appointment details, patient data, and schedule changes all in one place. 

Skedulo integrates with EHR systems like Epic, HR software like Workday, billing platforms, and much more. With this comprehensive view across data systems, staff spend less time (and experience less frustration) searching for data in multiple places.

The CEO of a home healthcare company put it this way: “The EHR tells us what we did. Skedulo tells us what our potential is—from all different angles. It helps us break down the silos between departments.” 

To see how MWM improves communication, reduces no-shows, and enhances the mobile EHR system, check out the results Solace Pediatric Home Healthcare achieved with Skedulo.

Healthcare Mobile Workforce Management
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