Do doctors have a reason to worry about transitioning to an EMR? Once you start talking about technology, software vendors, and EMRs, doctors who haven’t transitioned to an EMR can get nervous about how this would work in their practice. However, that’s not what they should be worried about.
According to Wikipedia, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's National Resource Center for Health Information Technology report that EMR implementations follow the 80/20 rule; where 80% of the work of implementation is spent on issues of change management, and only 20% is spent on technical issues related to the technology itself.
Since much of my professional career has involved EMR implementations, I agree with this statement. Time and time again I have seen offices fear the software and struggle with fitting their current business processes in with how the software functions, and this can lead to frustration and failure. Almost anything can be carried out more efficiently when proper planning has been done, and implementing an EMR is no exception.
Long before the software is installed on the computers in the office, doctors should be analyzing their current business processes to identify bottlenecks and areas of improvement. This can serve as two purposes. You can identify the areas that will affect the EMR implementation (staff's level of technology expertise) and have an action plan on how to resolve it prior to the EMR implementation, and you can also identify areas that you want the EMR to resolve. Finally, you can address the issue with staff spending countless hours searching for paper medical records!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment