With all of the buzz surrounding the deadlines and hand-wringing over system updates like ICD-10 and Meaningful Use Stage 2, it can be easy to forget why the industry is looking to implement and adopt new chiropractic EHR software in the first place: To improve the patient care experience and streamline its own recordkeeping abilities. That goal can sometimes be lost among all of the other talk, but a new study published in the American Journal of Managed Care brings it back into focus with another revelation about the importance of EHR adoption — namely, how it can save practices significantly on patient costs.

While that conclusion may not seem particularly eye-opening to some — as EHR use has long been promoted as a way to help the industry save billions of dollars — the new data set, compiled by a research team at the Medical University of South Carolina, has at long last put some hard numbers on that assessment. Citing figures from the National Inpatient Sample and Health Information Management Systems Society, the researchers found that hospitals and clinics could cut down on patient admission costs by 9.6 percent per person by utilizing EHR systems. The study's authors cautioned, though, that these savings depend greatly on fully implemented and properly used EHR software may be.

"Since EHR systems are complex and costly to implement, it is often a multistage process to adopt and use EHRs," the researchers wrote in their official findings. "Thus, hospitals must anticipate that the financial savings may not exist until advanced, 'meaningful' use is attained."

Nevertheless, a move toward incorporating chiropractic documentation software into a clinic's administrative duties is a step in the right direction — for both improving patient care and reducing clinical costs.