Electronic Health Records For Dummies

Determining initiative importance

Deciding an EHR initiative is a no-go can be good news. How can that be good news, you ask? Because you’re being honest with yourself and not committing thousands of dollars to an initiative for which you might be woefully unprepared. Trust us; your investors (and you) will thank you. Additionally, by declaring your practice not ready, you create an opportunity to sharpen your EHR focus, decide what you want from the process most, and set a timeframe that best suits your needs. This is your chance to improve processes and skills in anticipation of your EHR initiative, no matter how far down the road.

Use your assessment findings to decide how important the EHR initiative and individual aspects of it are to your practice. If, for example, you see that your employees are experiencing a great deal of trouble with coding and billing issues, thus affecting your bottom line, you know that you need a solution sooner rather than later. However, if processes are to everyone’s satisfaction and you’re moving to EHR because doing so is inevitable, perhaps you hold off until the timing is right. Determine how your EHR goals jibe with your team’s readiness and prioritize your EHR implementation based on that. Perhaps you’ll find that you can, for example, ramp up technical skills quickly or discuss global organizational issues in the background to make EHR a high priority. Determine EHR’s importance to you and solidify a timeframe that offers you the most benefit. ...