Chapter 4
Assessing Readiness
In This Chapter
Reviewing organizational goals
Measuring technological readiness
Charting status of infrastructure
Creating a readiness assessment questionnaire
When you’re ready to go vendor shopping, you can’t just start making phone calls and writing checks. Take some time to find out whether your practice is truly ready to make the move to an EHR. You might think things would operate much smoother without all of that paper, but don’t forget you have to preload and ultimately shred or store those files, train the staff, and evangelize the benefits of EHR to your patients. The moral of this story is to make sure you’re ready.
Adoption and implementation processes are neither quick nor easy, so take the time to be absolutely 100 percent sure that you’re ready to make the move to a paperless existence. Your successful move into an EHR-based way of life requires more than enthusiasm (you have that already). Your entire organization must be on board with the concept and resulting changes in procedure, workflow, and technology. A lack of readiness in those areas leaves your organization wide open for EHR adoption failure, which is something you don’t want. Guarantee your paperless success by assessing your organizational, technological, and clinician readiness.
If you find that your organization is not ready in one category (say, organizational readiness), ...
