In the comments of a previous post Fred gave the following advice about your IT support during an EMR implementation, “you can pay a little more upfront and be done with it or pay more over the long haul and never be happy.

My only caution with this is advice is that paying more isn’t always better. This is particularly true when you’re talking about what you pay for the advice you get from an IT person. However, I think Fred’s point is that if you scrimp on some of the technology up front it can come back to haunt you. Regardless of how much you pay, you need to make sure your IT person knows what they’re talking about.

An example of paying too little up front is if you purchase a computer with too little RAM. Some things you can cut back on. Feel free to get a smaller hard drive. Do you REALLY need the DVD burner with Blue-ray? Usually not, but skimping on something like RAM will make you miserable. Then, your computer will slow down your EMR and your next call to your EMR vendor you’ll say, “Your EMR is SLOW!!!” when in fact it’s just you spent too little money up front on the important things.