An EHR is an indispensable tool in today’s senior living communities. It provides you with a secure location to store your resident-specific data, including the recording of incidents and accidents. The paperless capability means you don’t have to worry about filing papers or losing important documents.

But recording individual incidents isn’t enough to improve quality of care and help prevent future accidents and falls. Although you’ll have the information you need on a resident’s history, this alone can’t help you improve your quality outcomes. The EHR simply isn’t designed to do this.

So how can you use the data you already have in your EHR to improve quality outcomes and financial performance?

Everyone knows that having the right staffing levels improves your star rating and the quality of the care you provide. Then why doesn’t everyone do it? The same reasons keep coming up:

• "We can’t find the right people."
• "We can’t keep the right people."
• "We have the right people, but they're doing tasks that don’t improve quality."

EHR systems are great tools for many different purposes in your facilities, but they aren’t a magic bullet for everything. Even the best tools have blindspots. Here are three gaps inherent in EHR systems that you will need to cover with additional tools.

If you have an EHR, you may think you have the data you need for complete QA reporting.  But when it comes to QA events, your EHR will likely leave you with questions — not answers — when an incident occurs.

Sure, you’ll have the incident recorded in the system, but your EHR simply isn’t designed to help you improve your quality outcomes. Here’s why your EHR can’t help you with QA reporting.