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How to shape an EHR to fit your practice
So you’ve crossed the digital frontier. Now what?
Depending on how much, or perhaps how little, you know about your new system, you may be thinking it’s largely a matter of plug in and play. Unfortunately, you’ll want to think again.
As this longtime commentator puts it, “With EHRs you have to spend time to save time (and maybe make a little bit of money too). You have to spend time softening and molding that EHR to fit your future practice.”
She goes on to note that “the biggest mistake people make, is to attempt to push and shove an off-the-shelf EHR into their current practice. This is not much different and makes as much sense as using Microsoft Word on a tablet with a stylus to hand write on it. So how do you go about molding an EHR to fit a future environment that is both enabled and limited by the introduction of the same EHR?”
The first thing to recognize, she says, is that “the EHR is sunk cost. You already paid for it and any additional tasks that can be offloaded to the EHR are net gains to you and your practice.”
From there she begins to compile a list of steps which, too our eyes, look pretty practical.
Here are just a couple:
1. “Make your own visit templates. Either you tweak the ones included in a good EHR or start from scratch and create exactly what you like. In most cases this is immensely time consuming, but if you don’t spend time upfront to mold your visit templates to your liking, you will never derive maximum utility from the EHR.”
And then . . .
4. “Deploy the patient portal that comes with your EHR and don’t be afraid to open it up for patients to do as much as possible online. Have your staff actively promote the portal to patients and give out instructions on how to use it. It will take time for patients to get used to online interaction with your practice, and it will take time for staff to get accustomed to it too, but savings can be significant depending on who your patients are, of course.”
Has she covered all, or at least most of, the bases? You tell us.
Photo courtesy of TANAKA Juuyoh via Creative Commons
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