Electronic Health Records For Dummies

Picking a team

Every team needs a captain, starting team members, and key people to come off the bench and provide a little extra help. The process of choosing your vendor is really no different, and a team approach allows everyone to have the opportunity to participate and appropriately share his or her thoughts and concerns.

Your vendor selection team should represent the perspectives of all stakeholders or at least all stakeholder groups in your office. We outline the team members from your practice in Chapter 4: a successful EHR implementation requires that the front office staff, the administrators, nurses, and physicians can effectively use the EHR. Therefore, they each need a role in the selection.

After you have a strong representation of office constituents (and even before hosting your first vendor selection meeting), be sure that you do the following:

Set expectations for the entire team and clearly define each person’s role in the vendor selection process. They need to know what you want each of them to provide in the vendor selection process and what sort of commitment is involved with the process.

Provide time on everyone’s schedule to participate. If you’re involving other physicians (and you should), then give them the schedule relief to attend the meetings and demonstrations.

Your fellow team members have day jobs. Whether they’re employees of your office or ...