Electronic Health Records For Dummies

Hospitals and health systems

Office practices are in high demand. Although the past trend was for hospitals to purchase a practice, hospital systems are opting to create alignment through IT rather than through acquisition. Each patient that comes to his or her hospital or to your clinic for a procedure resulting in an admission helps the hospital’s bottom line. Therefore, a local hospital may be willing to invest money and resources to help you implement an EHR and connect to their hospital.

Here’s how your local hospital can help you:

Vendor selection and management: Hospitals and health systems receive bulk purchase pricing for EHR software or hardware, have access to a larger budget than your practice, and go through a rigorous vendor selection and contracting process. You can benefit from their experience and may have an opportunity to participate in their vendor selection process or narrow your list of vendors because they’ve done the work for you. Check with your local health system to find whether they’re issuing requests for information (RFIs) or conducting demonstrations of EHRs that community physicians can attend. You can also benefit from the health system or hospital’s ability to manage the vendor, and set and maintain stringent performance benchmarks for both the technology and professional services, such as project management, system configuration, and training. Organizations need to ensure that the ambulatory EHR they select can integrate well with their hospital ...