According to a recent Medical Economics EHR Survey, provider satisfaction levels have been as low as 78%, so I wanted to help our healers by reminding them of a few things that could lead them to a regretful EHR purchase:
1.Selecting a Rigid Platform:
The average clinician spends 25,000 hours of hands-on clinical training. For that reason, EHR vendors should stay out of your way, and let you be the expert, practicing according to the workflow you know best. Unfortunately, providers are complaining rather loudly about EHR vendors that force them to adhere their workflow to the EHR which is backwards. Therefore, regardless of your medical specialty, make sure you select an EHR vendor that gives you a choice between a low-cost on-boarding process that includes repurposing previously created templates for your specialty, or a higher-touch process whereby they clone your paper charts. Truly flexible vendors should be able to support either option. I can't over emphasize the importance of selecting a Flexible vendor that can accompany your practice.
2.Selecting a Vendor with Multiple Logins:
Do yourself a favor and make sure your EHR, Billing System, and Clearinghouse are all available from a Single Sign-On which is the only real proof it's an integrated system. Anything less than a single sign-on for EHR, Billing, and Clearinghouse could lead to problems with dropped claims leading to lost revenues, lost demographics, and higher potential security risks. Most Meaningful Use Certified Vendors have a single sign-on for EHR, Billing, and Clearinghouse.
3.Selecting a Client-Server Application:
Buying software that requires a server, expensive annual maintenance contracts, and a sizable capital outlay doesn't make sense when there are so many well equipped Cloud-Based vendors that not only eliminate the need for medical practices to manage their own technology stack, but often do so with a much easier to use system at a significantly lower price point.
4.Selecting a Vendor That Doesn't Automate Your Practice:
The whole purpose of selecting an exciting new EHR & Billing program is to automate your practice, bring down overhead, and most importantly, improve quality of care and time spent outside the practice with your family. You can only do that by automating tasks. Make sure you select a vendor that has the ability to build powerful automated practice workflow rules that do things like automatically faxing progress notes to referring providers, automatically printing treatment plans for the patient during checkout, automatically reminding the front-desk staff when a patient's insurance authorization is almost expired, automatically reminding providers to bill appointments without associated claims, and allowing providers to share medical charts with other providers regardless of which EHR they use.
5.Selecting a Non Transparent Vendor:
If you run into a vendor that doesn't transparently provide pricing, demonstration videos, customer testimonials, and company background on their website, run the other way without passing go or collecting $200. It doesn't make sense, in this day and age, for any vendor to hide the ball. You should be able to make 90% of your purchasing decision without talking to a pushy sales rep, and this can only be done if the vendor has taken the time to make the purchasing process easy for you, the customer.
If hope this short checklist will prove helpful for the healers out there saving lives on a daily basis. Thanks for your tremendous service- I genuinely appreciate it :-).
Have a great day!!
Jason McDonald
Chief Sales Officer at iSALUS Healthcare
http://www.isalushealthcare.com/
