How Does Your EHR Vendor Solve Challenging Situations?

Today I was asked if I thought a specific EHR feature (in this case it was cloud hosted) was one area practices should consider looking at to avoid having a short sighted view of their EHR vendor. The specific feature and question are interesting, but I think it’s a short sighted way to look at an EHR vendor.

My immediate response was that when I look at an EHR vendor, I look at how they solve challenging situations and if they’re still solving those problems. I’m more interested in the EHR vendors direction and approach than I am any specific feature or function they offer today.

Let’s take them in the inverse order. Is your EHR vendor still solving your problems? This is a hard one to evaluate since meaningful use and EHR certification has hijacked the EHR development process. However, when you dig into an EHR vendor you can tell which ones are really investing in improving their platform and which ones are just doing the minimum necessary to retain their customers. It’s a totally different mindset. A forward thinking EHR vendor is trying to push the envelope, is interested in user feedback and is working towards a brighter future. An EHR vendor that’s doing the minimum necessary is just barely meeting the EHR certification and meaningful use requirements and never really responds to customer requests. Sure, they’ll do a bug fix here or there or fix anything major, but there’s no real investment in the future.

One easy way for you to start evaluating which vendors are investing in their future and which aren’t is to talk to their sales people. Does the salesperson have something new to sell you (like RCM or some other service)? If they do, it’s quite possible your EHR vendor has started focusing (and investing) on some new product and not the EHR anymore. Just remember that it’s really hard for a company to focus and invest in more than one area.

Sadly, I think many EHR users know that their EHR vendor has stopped innovating their product. They know this based on the release cycles of the EHR vendor. When was the last time your EHR vendor put out something that made your life as a clinician or a practice easier and it didn’t have to do with MU?

Related to the above is something that’s even more telling when it comes to the future of your EHR. Ask yourself the question, how does my EHR vendor approach solving challenging situations? If you talk to a lot of EHR vendors like I do, you can pretty quickly tell how an EHR vendor approaches problems. Unfortunately, many of them do the minimum work possible to solve the problem. The best EHR vendors dive deeply into the problem and not only solve the problem, but try to think of a better way to optimize everything surrounding the problem.

I still remember sitting down with an EHR vendor for breakfast one day. As they described their ePrescribing solution, they described how they could have implemented ePrescribing really quickly. However, they didn’t just want to have ePrescribing. They wanted to take the time to really understand ePrescribing and ensure that the doctor could ePrescribe with as few clicks as possible. They wanted to make sure that the process was efficient and accurate. It wasn’t enough to just be able to ePrescribe, but they wanted their doctors to be efficient while doing it too.

Reminds me of many of the ICD-10 implementations I’ve seen. I’d describe EHR vendor implementations as ok, better, and best. The “ok” implementation is that they have a search box which can search by word or code. Theoretically, this works. It just means you’re going to have a big book next to you or an app on your phone which lets you really find the code and then all you’re doing is entering the code. Not good!

The “better” implementation is the vendors that group codes so that when you search you can choose the group of codes and then essentially drill down into the group and find the code you need. In most cases, I’ve seen this type of implementation done by integrating a third party vendor. The EHR vendor often passes that third party cost on to the end user (imagine that). I’ll admit that a third party vendor integration for this feels kine of lazy. I’m all for third party integrations, but your EHR vendor won’t ever be able to take coding to the next level if they’re working with a third party. This kind of “grouping” approach is better, but it’s not the best.

The best type of ICD-10 implementation I’ve seen is one that integrates deeply into the EHR documentation. The documentation essentially narrows down the ICD-10 code list for you as you document the visit. Then, when it’s time to do your assessment, the hard work of identifying the right codes is already done for you. Sure, you’ll need to verify that the machine approach to ICD-10 identification is right, but it’s the best approach I’ve seen to ICD-10.

Hopefully this ICD-10 example gives you a view into what I mean when I say that you have to evaluate how an EHR vendor works to solve a problem. Are they just trying to get by or do they take their solution to the next level of automation? I feel sorry for the doctors who are stuck on EHR software that’s no longer investing in their EHR and just take the minimal necessary approach to EHR development.

Going back to the person’s initial question about cloud hosted EHR, it’s easy today to say that every EHR vendor should be on the cloud. The cloud has won in every industry and it will eventually win in healthcare as well. However, cloud or not is not what concerns me. I’d be more interested in hearing an EHR vendors reason for going cloud or not. Not to mention their reasons for moving to cloud or not. That will tell you how an EHR solves a problem and how an EHR works with new technology. Their direction and approach to those challenges is much more important than the specific choice they make.

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.

   

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