Electronic Health Records For Dummies

Determining a budget

Next on your to-do list is money management. Determining how to pay for an EHR (they don’t fall off trees, remember?) plays a huge role in whether you proceed and how you proceed with EHR adoption and implementation.

Your budget should include more than just the sticker price of the EHR. Take into account costs associated with preparation, training, go-live, employee overtime, and added support.

We recommend including line items for the following:

Hardware

Software

Chart conversion

Training

Installation

Network connectivity

Workflow redesign

Loss of productivity

Initial tech support

Additional fees associated with training (travel expenses for offsite personnel or vendor reps, catering, and so on)

Annual software maintenance, upgrades, and support

Hardware upgrades or replacement

Construction or facility fees (for example, adding permanent hardware or changing a file room to a patient exam room)

Miscellaneous

You can read more about the specifics of EHR costs and budgeting in Chapter 5.

After you settle on a budget that works for your organization, you have to pay for all these EHR goodies. Thankfully, you have options, and you don’t necessarily have to set aside a huge chunk of your annual organizational budget at one time:

Paying upfront: This is exactly what it sounds like — you pay out your entire EHR budget. Obviously, you can’t pay for ongoing costs ...