Watching the East Coast prepare for Hurricane Irene last weekend had me flashing back to the aftermath of the tornadoes that hit Joplin, Missouri, earlier this year. Would hospitals suffer the same levels of destruction that St. John’s Regional Medical Center did? Would they be as successful in evacuating patients and treating them off-site with limited supplies and infrastructure?

Fortunately, lessons learned from providers in Joplin, and to a greater extent from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, enabled providers along the East Coast to implement well thought-out disaster preparedness plans at their facilities. Mother Nature also lent a hand by withholding from Hurricane Irene the extreme conditions her predecessor unleashed on the South some six years ago.

The team at North Shore – Long Island Jewish Health System makes a compelling case study for the smoothness with which detailed planning can bring to hospital evacuation scenarios. The short video below gives a glimpse into the efforts the hospital’s staff put forth to evacuate 252 in-patients and 50 emergency department patients in less than 24 hours. The helpful Mr. HISTalk has compiled a brief list of updates on several additional hospitals affected by the storm (scroll down to the bottom of the post for updates).

It was by pure coincidence that news of e-MDs’ launch of its Rounds® mobile EMR app for the iPhone reached my desk just as Hurricane Irene was closing in on land. The new app enables physicians to remotely and securely key in patient information from their EHRs via their mobile device – surely a tool that physicians would find useful in treating patients during an evacuation process such as that undertaken by North Shore-LIJ.

Patrick Hall, Executive Vice President of Business Development at e-MDs, told me that the mobile health solution was launched “to help our physician clients stay connected to patient information. We have observed that [they] have been dealing with more and more work when they are away from the office. This provides them with a convenient tool to deal with some of this, using an easily carried device that gives them access to complete patient information so they can make informed decisions about patient care.”

I’ll be interested to learn if any hospitals or private practice physicians came away with “success” stories because of their mobile EMR solutions. I think we can all breathe a sigh of relief that successes this time around far outnumber the failures.

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

This is a SHOUT OUT to all doctors who use EMRs. Which EMRs do you use and how do you like them. Do you love them or hate them? Are you luke warm in your like or dislike? Tell us which EMR you have and how you feel about it. Also tell us what you would do (the mistakes and the good moves) if you were looking into getting an EMR at this time.

I have personally looked at Greenway PrimeSuite, SOAPware, SRSsoft, e-MDs, AmazingCharts, NextGen, Centricity and others.

Can you comment on the cost and the usability?. Let’s share information so we can help other doctors choose systems that are usable, simple to learn, effective and efficient.

If you don’t have an EMR and are looking into one, what questions would you have for those “who have gone before you”? What advice would you be interested in receiving?