In the same way as practice management systems optimized your patient schedule, today’s EHR guarantee to automate your clinical workflows. Having an EHR can help you reduce time spent on charting; it offers efficient patient visits and helps meet the requirements.
The good about selecting an EHR is that it doesn’t need any in depth knowledge. Instead you just need to follow a simple disciplined selection procedure. As there are hundreds are of different software packages available on the market you can quickly narrow them down if you know what criteria to follow.
- Take ownership of decision: The EHR Software that you use will affect you regarding how you practice your medicine. So this is not a process that should be handed over to your staff or some computer guy. Although the practice staff has a key role to play in selection but this process requires leadership and medical expertise that only the physician can offer. You need to take ownership of the selection process to make sure you buy the right EHR!
- Decide your own requirements: You are the only one who knows how you practice medicine. Thus it is essential to chalk out your own workflow and how you interact with practice staff to complete the patient visit. Do you want a system with end to end solution that goes all the way to claim management or you just want to restrict the system to electronic charting? Remember that your interaction with the vendor is an opportunity to learn new workflows and practices that can help you improve your work. Based on your requirements create a detailed list of features and prioritize them based on which is most relevant to your practice.
- Select the right EHR for your specialty: Many EHRs are designed to serve a large number of practices while others are designed for specialties. Each approach has its benefits and drawbacks. The focus of the specialty EHR vendors allows them to design their systems around the specific needs of physicians within their target market. For example an OB/GYN EHR would have some templates designed particularly for ante partum visits. This helps provide familiar workflow for the specialty provider. Large vendors with that have wider reach and more resources may not be able to provide the specialty workflows and features. So you need to ask the larger and more generic vendors to tell you how they will meet unique requirements of your practice.
- Ease of use: Practicing medicine without software is complex enough to handle. Thus it is essential to find a system that makes every encounter easier and not hard. The system must be easy to use. The easiest way to assess ease of use is to have the demo of the product yourself. EHR features that supplement the ease of use of the software include stylus interface, voice recognition and online help functions.
- Analyze support and upgrades: Consider how support is delivered. Leading vendors offer support 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. You will definitely be needing support on weekends if you work like most physicians and you might also require nighttime support even though you’re viewing records. Consider factors like, do you want help on site? Or are you fine talking to a foreign call center staff? When we talk about software the support isn’t only the technical assistance, it also includes bug fixes, access to new features and getting upgrades. Evaluate the vendor’s record in delivering the high quality new releases regarding the software and staying consistent.
- Be smart regarding your budget: With EHR software’s prices can range from $1,000 to $100,000 so you can quickly narrow your search based on price. But using this approach you are more likely to limit your ability to find the right system. The software doesn’t need to be expensive to be good so don’t buy on the price alone. The right buyer will consider buying the system based on return on investment rather than thinking about the money. Expensive systems usually meet the latest standards like CCHIT, and meet sophisticated features and are integrated with third party devices like imaging systems and heart monitors.
- Make a Deployment Strategy: Using the new technologies and internet connections it is possible to access your health records from anywhere over the web. These are software as a service (SaaS) or Application Service Provider (ASP) and offer low front costs, they provide ease of use of a Web Base Application and simplify maintenance. There is a large investment done by vendors in security, data redundancy and HIPAA compliance. SaaS requires a high speed internet connection to work consistently. But the practice will be less efficient if the connection is slow. If the connection is down so will the ability to access the patient records.
Selecting the right EHR Software is a prerequisite to having a best practice. There are many more criteria regarding the selection process for EHRs but these seven best practices will help you find the right system for your practice.
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