EHR Lifecycle

Far too many organizations look at the EHR go live as the end all be all to EHR implementations. Unfortunately, this fallacy in thinking has caused many EHR implementations to suffer after the EHR go live. The reality of an EHR implementation is that it’s never done.

This was highlighted really well in this graphic that The Advisory Board Company put out about the EHR life cycle. They compare the EHR lifecycle to that of raising a child. The most poignant part of this chart to me are the final 3 phases of the EHR lifecycle which are all after the EHR go live event. These final 3 phases are listed as ongoing. In other words, these final 3 phases will never end.

See the details in the graphic below (click on it to see a larger version):

If you don’t have a process in place to improve your EHR use, performance, and the benefits you receive from your EHR, then you should get one now.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

2 Comments

  • I was surprised to see this graphic only considers IT to be critical in 2 of the 7 stages (Build, Test & Train and Go Live). I’ll freely admit my bias as a member of IT, I think IT is critical in all stages since they will be the ones implementing and maintaining the EHR.

    What perspective am I missing?

  • Mike,
    I’ll reference the other post I created yesterday about the operational CIO versus the strategic CIO: http://www.hospitalemrandehr.com/2017/05/30/operational-cio-vs-strategic-cio/

    Using that as a framework for reference, I think there are many IT organizations that are just operational IT organizations and so they aren’t involved (and many don’t want to be involved) in the later stages. If this is an IT organization’s approach, then the above graphic is accurate (and sadly it is true for many organizations).

    If on the other hand you’re a strategic IT organization, then you’re likely involved in every step of the above chart. Sounds like this applies to you. It’s how I’d do it if I were IT in an organization as well.

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