When it comes to treating addictions and other behavioral health matters, careful considerations are required, especially when talking about electronic health records (EHR) and, in particular, when you need to consider an EHR vendor.
Accreditation Is a Must
EHR software should have a number of features. It needs to be easy to use to schedule patient appointments, and it should have meaningful reporting capabilities. In addition, the data should be tightly secured to minimize data breaches.
However, the most important feature EHR software should have is accreditation under the CARF standards for behavioral health.
What Are the Standards?
Short for the Commission on Accreditation of Rehabilitation Facilities, CARF was established in 1966. Its goal since then is to provide standards of certification for organizations in the human services fields. Its main focus is on traditional facilities such as addiction treatment centers.
Of the many healthcare areas it looks at, CARF accredits treatment centers, community housing, intensive outpatient treatments, and EHR software. What CARF looks for when approving an EHR vendor is the amount of data security and privacy.
CARF and IT
Overall, the entire IT structure of an addiction treatment center or other behavioral health institute needs to be examined. While the EHR software may be secure, the network or other system paths may not. Thus, patient information can still be susceptible to a breach.
So, consider two items to move forward with any type of EHR software. First, the digital security of any institution must be upgraded. While a perfect solution doesn’t exist, proper setup of firewalls and virus software certainly minimizes the risk of malicious activity.
Second, you need to send out an EHR request for proposal (EHR RFP) to the software vendors you’re interested in. Within the template you submit, make sure to include a section on CARF standards for behavioral health accreditation. As the proposals come back in, you’ll be able to narrow down your choices to the ones that work with CARF standards.
