The following is the experience of one user who’s switching their EMR from Penchart to e-MDs that I think is insightful to consider before selecting an EMR so that one day you don’t have to deal with these issues. You can find the original posting on EMRUpdate. I’ll add a few takeaway points at the end.

We are a 10 doc /3 office practice that is going from dinosaur Penchart to e-MDs. We were supposed to go live a few months ago but we are huge issues getting our data converted (it ain’t going work) and getting training. We are a very EMR established practice having started using tablets and our EMR 5-7 years ago. We have pushed back our GO LIVE date 2 times already.

Were are now on our 3 project manager and we are just finding out that our data won’t port well to e-MDs. We new it won’t be great but it took a year to find out how unsuccessful it will be. e-MDs wants to train us but they do not want to look our current workflow to see how customize e-MDs to fit our current methods. “This is how we do it”. Our practice has 40,000 patients and 10 doctors (some of which are old school and have a hard time learning a new way).

I think the software is going to be great but our trasition to is is more painful then we ever thought.

Anyone have same experiences with e-MDs specifically?

Are there similar experiences with many/all other EMR conversions?

Our frustrations are the we get new answers with each or our 3 project managers, the original sales person “is no longer with the company”, 3 rd party conversion company is much less helpful they previously thought, and e-MDs look looking at our situation to see how best to aid our training.

My takeaways:
-Large EMR companies are going to have a problem scaling project managers
-EMR data conversions are a pain and you better have the right people doing it or you’re in trouble
-We need better standards for exporting patient information to avoid EMR data conversions
-Verify your EMR vendors ability to customize to your workflows or prepare to change your workflows