Common Hurdles To A Successful EHR Implementation
June 5, 2013
If you were a healthcare provider and all you did was read press releases, you’d be tempted to think that transitioning to a new EHR involved little more than opening the package and plugging in the contents.
Naturally, things are a little more complicated than that, but many providers aren’t aware of just how much more complicated the truth really is.
Environmental Intelligence, a State of Texas contracted vendor of Healthcare Information Technology and Related Services, have found that using technology is really new for a lot of physician practices.
Given that naiveté, we have seen and experienced many practices struggle with performance issues related to their workflows, largely because their care delivery structures aren’t always suited to taking advantage of EHRs and they’re not clear on the proper steps toward greater efficiency.
Our extensive experience has taught us there are four generally unanticipated issues that providers encounter when they transition from paper records to EHRs.
- Network issues. This is one of the most difficult areas. If a practice uses an inadequate hosted EHR infrastructure accessed through the Internet, it could cause delays as the information gets loaded slowly or dramatically slow down workflows. That, naturally, leads to provider frustration.
- Untested upgrades. Upgrades make things better, right? Maybe. The problem here is that the upgrade might come from the vendor, but the customer has customized the original system and the upgrade hasn’t been tested within their own (now customized) ecosystem.
- Ineffective template design. Templates are a love ’em or hate ’em proposition. On the one hand they allow for data input uniformity, while on the other they often restrict the capacity of providers to make comprehensive notes. On an operational level, templates are often just plain inefficient, and they offer too many distracting alerts. Providers new to EHRs may not understand how to solve either of those problems.
- Genuine application performance issues. Many problems stem from how the EHR has been deployed. Again, these aren’t plug-and-play systems, a fact which too many providers don’t realize until they’re knee deep in impediments to productivity. The good news, however, is that systems can be analyzed, with an eye toward determining what modules need to be tweaked or moved to different parts of the system.
While there are few problems that can’t be solved post-implementation, often providers don’t realize they have problems to correct until their systems have been in place for some time. In large part, that’s because even less than optimally installed EHRs can help with upcoding right away. Consequently, providers who may now be able to bill for services that once fell by the wayside may not realize until later that, in reality, their overall productivity has decreased.
The truth is that the problems listed above can lead to up to a 30 percent decrease in productivity if the EHR installation and implementation is not done properly. Our Physician Focused. Patient Driven® approach and process to EHR implementation assures our clients don’to experience these types of problems.
Physicians and medical organizations must understand that EHR’s aren’t out of the box solutions. There are other activities and services that need to take place, so providers should plan for them at the beginning.
