How To Successfully Implement An EHR System: Best Practices

In today’s information age, as our lives are getting increasingly digitized, health data is valuable. Health data is required for maintaining our health records, for helping physicians and health care professionals review patient information and collaborate on providing health care services and for driving health-related decision making, whether for an individual patient or for broader analysis such as determining the efficacy of health procedures or medication or monitoring emergency medical situations.

Hospitals and health care facilities should consider EHR implementation as more of a process engineering project than a technology project — one that adapts their organization and health care staff to modernized health care processes that make use of a technology system. This focus on medical processes allows you to use the EHR system as a tool to make work more efficient, rather than letting the technology dictate the work of your staff. Use the following best practices and tips to make your EHR implementation more successful.

Best Practices

• Assess your needs - Take a process engineering approach and focus on understanding the medical processes at the hospital and how these need to be changed and adapted to use an electronic system. Form a joint team with the EHR system implementation vendor and key hospital staff members and shadow the medical processes at the facility to understand and document them and visualize how they will adapt to the electronic system.
• Choose a flexible platform - The EHR system should provide flexible APIs and bidirectional data integration for supporting interoperability. 
• Check your contract - Your contract should have provisions to give you flexible access to the data along with ownership so you can do reporting and analysis as required and integrate the EHR with other products and devices for future growth and advancement.
• Make sure support is available - Ensure you have enhanced support for the first three to six months of operation. You should expect to find gaps and areas for improvement when you first put the system live. You should have the flexibility to make updates and adjustments accordingly until your system stabilizes for long-term use.

The full Forbes article can be viewed at this link.