Accountable Care Organization (ACO) is a healthcare organization composed of voluntary healthcare professionals that include providers, healthcare professionals, hospitals, labs and practices, who come together to perform quality care delivery service for Medicare eligible candidates. EMR stands for Electronic Medical Record, and ACO must use an EMR software to provide high quality service.
Let’s go through some of the ACO features an EMR needs to accommodate.
Standards monitoring and proper management tools, are not efficient in patient service feature in a lot of EMRs out in the market. This result is inconsequential referential integrity when using an EMR. It makes the tracking service of patients a headache or in other words, an impossibility. Take an example. Patient service item is required to be recorded in three sections: exam note, order and message. The verification function from the exam note to the order is inefficiently performed quite frequently, in an EMR while in an ACO’s patient service the tracking of the patient is efficiently performed. It is done so by keeping a track of all events derived from the patient visit or data gathered through contextual tools in order to manage patient service.

Exchanges related to an ACO are entered as miscellaneous message in an EMR. The information pertaining to Counterparty Credit Risk transactions automatically comes in an EMR too, without a proper audit trail. An EMR should be able to identify information accurately from the source.
EMR systems make Continuity of Care Record comply with Meaningful Use, but fail to keep track of the lifecycle of the record. Electronic transaction should be tracked in an EMR software to its source efficiently, from authorization, claim and medical billing. The feature of ACO needed in an EMR is the ability to track the CCR within the EMR software. It will result in producing a proper patient note, and will transmit the visit note to the source of the CCR, which will help in smoothly tracking the process.

There are many structural EMR issues that remain unanswered in an ACO. It is by trial and error method, demand and supply chain and by going to the basic functions repeatedly, the missing features will be added. Since, the use EMR is a necessity of an ACO, EMR vendors should try their best to adequately build the support structure needed to provide the collaborative care ACO aims for. This can be made possible by the combined effort of ACOs and EMR vendors who are interested in filling up the gaps in their product.