Time for the second entry covering Shawn Riley’s list of 101 Tips to Make your EMR and EHR More Useful. I hope you’re enjoying the series.
75. Find out how easy it is to do process improvement
This could be phrased another way. How much with the EMR you’re considering improve your processes and how much will the EMR cause you to change your EMR processes for the worse? I love when EMR vendors like to say that they’re EMR makes it so the clinic doesn’t have to change their processes. It makes me laugh, because just the fact that you have to enter something electronically instead of on paper means you’re changing something. Even if the doctor still writes on paper and scans it in, that means they’ve changed their process since now they have to scan it and view the documents in a scanned format.
The point obviously being that any and every EHR implementation requires change. The question you should consider is how many of the changes will improve your clinic and how many of the changes will cause heartache. I’d guess that every EHR vendor will have quite a few of both types of change.
74. Predictive analytics are a huge benefit
I’ll let Shawn’s words speak for themselves on this one: “Everyone wants to know what volumes are going to like like next year. How many encounters will I have? How many admissions? If the analytics are built straight into the EMR you will have a much easier time trying to estimate the costs and resources necessary for the upcoming years. This improves your ability to do strategic planning, and should lower your costs from 3rd party applications or consultants.”
73. Automatic trending with graphing is a huge help
As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. It’s amazing the impact a graph can have on seeing trends. This is true if the graph is about an individual patient or across all your patients. Look for EHR vendors that do a good job capturing the trends you want to watch as a doctor.
72. Evaluate process flows that come directly from the application
This relates to EMR tip #75 above. Many process flows in an EHR are flexible, but other things are hard coded and can’t be changed. Make sure the hard coded EHR processes are ones that you can live with before you sign your EHR contract. If you can’t see any hard coded processes in the EHR you’re evaluating, you probably haven’t looked hard enough or in the right places.
71. Are we integrating or interfacing
This topic is particularly important in the hospital setting where you always have multiple systems running. How well you integrate or interface those systems matters a lot. Plus, every EHR vendor has different abilities to integrate or interface. Be aware of what’s possible and more importantly the limitations of those integrations or interfaces.
If you want to see my analysis of the other 101 EMR and EHR tips, I’ll be updating this page with my 101 EMR and EHR tips analysis. So, click on that link to see the other EMR tips.
