Electronic Health Records For Dummies

Creating a short list

You don’t want to distribute your RFI to 400 vendors, so you should create a short list of vendors likely to meet most of your needs. Vendors target specific markets based on practice size and specialty. Use this information to help narrow the field. Combine your requirements with some industry information and identify no more than five vendors of the same type for the RFI distribution. Include the following vendors on your list:

Vendors suggested by your colleagues.

Vendors your hospitals recommend.

Vendors recommended by your specialty society.

Vendors your local HIE or Regional Extension Center supports. (If you’re not sure how to contact the HIE, ask your local hospital’s IT department or your Regional Extension Center.)

Review industry rating information from such groups as KLAS (www.klasresearch.com), peer-reviewed ratings at AmericanEHR Partners (www.americanehr.com), shown in Figure 6-1, or your specialty society. There is a fee for the full report from KLAS, but you can review the summary information on its Web site. You can find the latest year’s ratings of ambulatory EHRs by practice size, too.

Figure 6-1: American-EHR Partners comparison engine.

Ideally, there should be a fair amount of overlap from all the sources so your list isn’t unwieldy. ...