Electronic Health Records For Dummies

Culture

Consider how your practice’s corporate culture may affect your readiness for the EHR move. Practice culture, in this case, deals with how the people in your organization interact with one another and how they will respond to adopting and implementing EHR.

Leadership

Take into consideration your leadership team’s readiness to juggle multiple EHR-related tasks, such as information management, financial considerations, human resources, and technical concerns. Not every physician in your office needs to be an expert in all things EHR-related; that wouldn’t leave them much time for what they do best — patient care. However, your physicians should be ready to assist in what may be the biggest corporate transition your practice ever sees.

Find out whether anyone in your practice has experience leading a large-scale change initiative. If you’re lucky enough to have someone like this on staff, enlist him or her to your leadership team ASAP.

Staff

Obviously, your office staff is on your readiness checklist. These stakeholders most likely have to access multiple portions of the EHR frequently. Therefore, get an idea of how they feel about this significant change to their routines and workflows. Sometimes, one of the biggest issues with EHR transition is the reluctance of employees to embrace new technology and processes. Barriers during the transition process can result in resistance ...