In the ongoing battle at the small end of the electronic health records market, drchrono claims to have struck new ground by bringing its EHR to the iPhone.
While versions of EHRs running on mobile devices are widely available, the distinction here is that drchrono claims this latest version is a fully-functional EHR, rather than one retrofitted for mobile phones.
The company said the iPhone edition enables doctors to "document a full patient encounter," then lock the note and submit the claim to a billing agent or insurance company.
[See also: New medical billing app from drchrono.]
It's no surprise vendors are bringing mobile-optimized software to the market. Just about every EHR-maker – from big guns, such as Epic and Cerner, to smaller shops like HealthFusion and iPatient Care – offers versions for tablets.
Practice Fusion, in fact, released an iteration engineered specifically for tablets in October 2014 and said at the time that it was evaluating whether or not to also build a version for phones.
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According to survey results Black Book published this summer, 72 percent of participating physicians plan to adopt mobile EHR systems this year and 31 percent are already using a smartphone to manage patient data in one way or another.
Whether doctors will find a phone screen is large enough to be practicable when using an EHR or not, however, remains to be seen.
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