Palliative care practices often start small - one or two physicians rounding in a handful of skilled nursing facilities, using whatever EHR was available when they launched. Then the practice grows. More providers join. More facilities come on. The patient volume increases. And suddenly the EHR that was manageable at five providers is a serious problem at fifteen.
This is not a story about growing pains. It is a story about fit. Most EHRs used in palliative care were never designed for the way palliative rounding actually works.
Documentation time per provider climbs. When a practice is small, a clunky EHR is annoying but survivable. When you add providers, the documentation inefficiency multiplies. A system that costs each provider 20 extra minutes per day costs a small rounding practice over 200 hours of physician time per week. That is not a small number.
Billing accuracy drops. Growing practices add facilities, payer mixes get more complex, and the gap between what is documented and what is billed widens. EHRs without clean documentation that feeds your billing workflow lose charges in that gap. Palliative practices have told us directly that they start to feel this as practice revenue flattens even as patient volume grows.
Multi-facility coordination becomes unmanageable. Logging into a separate system for each facility, or managing patient lists across disconnected platforms, works when you are in two buildings. It does not work when you are in twenty. The time cost is real, and the error risk increases with every extra step.
Compliance requirements get harder to meet. As practices grow and Medicare billing increases, reporting requirements grow more complex. Practices using an EHR that creates extra work around compliance end up with administrative burden that should not fall on the clinical team.
Palliative care documentation has specific requirements that general EHRs handle poorly:
Goals of care conversations need to be captured in a way that is both clinically complete and reportable
Symptom management documentation needs to reflect the trajectory of care, not just the snapshot of a single visit
Communication with family members and caregivers is part of the care record and needs to be structured, not lost in free text
care coordination in post-acute settings (for practices with dementia patients) requires additional structured documentation
A generic EHR can capture some of this. But when the documentation workflow requires workarounds, documentation quality suffers - and so does billing accuracy.
A palliative care practice that is growing or already larger than 5 providers needs:
Single-page encounter views that are fast across all facility types
Multi-facility patient lists with one login
Pull Forward that actually carries palliative-relevant history between visits
Structured templates that meet structured documentation without extra steps
Straightforward documentation with no unnecessary steps between charting and billing
24/7 support from people who know LTPAC workflows
EasyRounds was built for exactly this type of practice. It is not a generic EHR that covers palliative care as one of many specialties. It is a rounding-first EHR that was designed by physicians who work in the same environments.
If your practice has outgrown your current system - or is close to it - we are glad to show you what a better fit looks like.