An Electronic Medical Record (EMR) is not only electronically education of patients’ paper chart its more than that. EMRs are patient health-related records contain the medical and treatment histories of patients, diagnosis, medications, treatment plans, laboratory and test results, and much more that make available instantly and securely to authorized users.
Patient health-related Information comes on the digital health platform can navigate and leverages digital progress and can deliver improved patient care and coordination with improving diagnosis and patient outcomes.
The EMR implementation experience depends on a variety of factors including the change management and related process, leadership, technology, training, and the practice environment.
Here you find 7 points to consider for EMR implementation:
- Prepare yourself and motivate your staff:
First, you mentally prepare your self to implement EMR in your practice. Be prepared to change workflow according to EMR enable the system. When workflow changes first your staff will face and adjusted with that so you motivating and training staff and physicians.
- Choose EMR enabled Cloud-based or Web-based Software:
As your need and availability of resources, you have to choose EMR enabled Cloud-based Software. Whatever you choose has no requirement of additional existing hardware, easy to learn, and use by staff, cover all features if your practices expand in the future.
- Build your team:
You’ll need a strong team to help the process go as smoothly as possible. The team can include staff members such as physicians, nurses, medical assistants, and administrative staff. Assign a role to team members, to set a clinical workflow. As per your practice set up, you assign a super admin, physician or doctor, and technician are three basic roles to consider while building your team.
Superadmin:
The Superadmin has total power and control of the whole system. Superadmin can assign roles, template creation, and developing workflows. This position may also be responsible for creating standard operating procedures to address problems users come across as they use the system.
Physician or Doctor:
The Role of a Physician or doctor is a bridge between technical staff and the practice/organization to successfully implementation of EMR. Consider utilizing a tech-savvy physician who more accepts the new process as the physician or doctor.
Technician:
The technician will become the main point of contact with the software provider and staff. The technician is common to all departments will help to focus on implementation, track progress, and deal with user issues.
- Transfer Data:
When the establishment of your hardware and software is finish and ready to go, the next step in EMR implementation is to transfer the data. In the first step, you’ll need to determine how to migrate data.
For transferring data, You can assign existing staff, or hire additional or temporary staff to upload information into the new EMR. One data transfer is complete, try to check all the data is correctly transfer or not.
- Create Workflows:
Design a solid workflow for your practice, while implementing EMR, minimum stress face to your staff. If any lacking in the workflow can disturb the staff output. When you create workflow Consider these points:
- Value-added for the patient
- Necessity
- Should increase efficiency for the staff
- Should be the right order
- Should be the right person doing this step
- Back up plan while EMR enabled software down:
Make a strong backup plan while EMR down in working hours. You give clear instructions to physicians and staff, what to do when the EMR is unavailable. When you developing your Back up plan, Consider these points:
- About continue patient care flow
- Communication with physicians and staff during downtime
- Physicians & staff document the visit
- Patient check-in occurs
To map all activities when EMR downtime is there in which you consider all electronic and paper procedures provide to staff.
- Finally launch:
When the final launch is decided. Do a mock round of testing to ensure your workflow is properly working or not, then the actual “Go Live” it is recommended to lower the patient volume which will ensure a smooth transition for both patients and staff.
Whenever your plan is ready then decide how to launch. There are mainly two strategies to launch one if all at once and the other is slowly one by one launch.
Some practices preferred, all at once – strategy and at the same time roll out the EMR system for all patients and staff.
While other practices preferred one by one slowly launch. They started phase wise with first implementing, such as e-prescribing and then introducing one by one other feature later.
Conclusion:
For healthcare providers, EMR implementation is not anything wealthy. Choose an EMR system as per requirement. However, there are many hurdles to the successful deployment of EMR which can be prevented with proper planning and strategic execution.
Drlogy
