There is no shortage of healthcare IT companies who will try to sell you their wares using lists of behavioral health EHR attributes they label as “must-haves.” In truth, the list of healthcare IT essentials should be more oriented around general characteristics and objectives than specific functions. Clinicians have had alert-fatigue for some time now. What they want is a system that effectively supports them without becoming obnoxious.

It might also be helpful to think of an optimal platform as “more is less,” i.e., in terms of what a robust solution should NOT be. While your inpatient behavioral health facility can still reap numerous benefits from an otherwise complete EHR that’s lacking this bell and that whistle, you might find yourself in a net-negative position if you adopt a platform with these liabilities.

It’s too focused on behavioral health. In an inpatient environment, even when a patient was admitted with primarily psychiatric issues, it’s rare for health challenges to remain just behavioral. Mental health challenges eventually create comorbidities that manifest as correlated behavioral issues and acute or chronic physical disorders. An effective inpatient behavioral health platform will enable clinicians to manage all patient ailments without having to log in to a separate acute care solution.  

It doesn’t fully consider the whole patient. Even if an inpatient behavioral health system supports both physical and mental health, it may not do so comprehensively. There is no reason to settle for high quality behavioral health functionality and the bare minimum coverage for physical health. The inpatient solution you select should be as robust on the physical health side as platforms running complex hospitals and medical centers.

It doesn’t have an integrated revenue cycle component. Yes, you can implement a separate revenue cycle management (RCM) system and then set it up to automate claims generation and other processes by interfacing with the EHR. But why spend the time setting all that up when you don’t have to? Why incur the costs of configuration and interface development? To realize significant financial and efficiency benefits—real-time payer eligibility checks, inclusive authorization requests with automatic follow-up reminders, built-in claims resolution, fewer billing delays and denials, faster payment collections—make sure the EHR and revenue cycle components are integrated in one platform.

It can’t easily interoperate with third-party applications and devices. Some EHR systems are extensively flexible and are implemented with a portfolio of integration interfaces that streamline communication. These systems are not as common to inpatient behavioral health, however, which makes it incumbent on your organization to have the right conversation when looking for a system. Are standard interfaces included in the overall solution proposal? What are the development costs if they have to be created? Ask about how your prospective new solution will impact what you do across the continuum.

It can’t be customized to your workflows and staff needs. Healthcare IT long ago passed the “we can’t customize the system” threshold. Almost all technology providers can now make numerous alterations that meet you and your staff at least halfway in terms of workflows. Indeed, you should now expect an IT platform that doesn’t force clinicians and staff to make wholesale changes in how they provide care but instead enhances the care they provide. Don’t consider any system that can’t do that.

There is very little in the EHR that can be automated. This is no less important with behavioral health care than it is in an acute care setting. We set technology up to reliably do simple things for us in almost every other industry and shouldn’t accept healthcare as an exception. Automated order sets, for example, are a bare-minimum expectation when looking at inpatient behavioral health EHRs, and orders should automatically generate charges, which in turn feed data into the final billing process. There is no reason any of these kinds of tasks should be done manually anymore.

You have to do a lot of manual work to generate reports. The federal reporting burden on behavioral health facilities is already heavy and seems to increase annually. In particular, Inpatient Psychiatric Facility Quality Reporting (IPFQR) is essential to ensure Medicare reimbursement, and Hospital-Based Inpatient Psychiatric Services (HBIPS) is required for Joint Commission accreditation. To secure money and reputation, quality reporting is essential and must be easily configurable to eliminate the heavy lifting so often associated with creating reports. Beyond that, the system should have a fully customizable automated data collection tool that can pull different types of data from the system and use it to compile sophisticated ad-hoc reports, create meaningful dashboards, and offer real-time analytics.

It takes up much more of your budget than it is worth. How does one measure the ultimate value of a healthcare IT platform? It’s not a product of guesswork. A robust behavioral health EHR should enable clinicians to focus more on patients, improve communications amongst the care team, streamline processes that can be automated like billing and claims management, and enable efficient workflows that improve existing processes. You can give much of that a dollar value and compare before implementation with after. What has the system done for your bottom line? Do you feel like your organization is running more smoothly? Within several months, it should not be a challenge to answer those questions.

Whether you are evaluating the system you’re using or scoping out alternatives, these concerns will help you determine exactly what to look for in an inpatient behavioral health platform that has the capacity to meet your needs for years. The potential for change in many areas—government regulation, payment models, payer requirements, treatment modalities—illustrate the need for IT solutions that can adapt quickly without requiring dramatic changes under the hood. The specific functionalities will change and improve, but they may not be in service to this core set of characteristics to look for.