101 Tips to Make Your EMR and EHR More Useful – EHR Tips 36-40

Time for the next entry covering Shawn Riley’s list of 101 Tips to Make your EMR and EHR More Useful. I hope you’re enjoying the series.

40. Do NOT let the finance department drive the EMR choice or deployment
I’m far too much of a physician advocate to even imagine a finance department driving the EMR choice and deployment plan. Ok, I understand that it happens, but it’s a travesty when it does. Considering the finance department will almost never use the system, it should make sense to everyone to have the users of the system help drive the EMR choice and deployment. After all, they will have to use the system once deployed.

Let’s not confuse what I’m saying. I’m not saying that finance shouldn’t be involved in the EMR choice. I’m not saying that finance can’t provide some great insights and an outside perspective. I also am not saying that users of the EMR should hold the hospital hostage with crazy demands that could never be met. It’s definitely a balance, but focus on the users of the EMR will lead to happy results.

39. Ensure work flow can be hard coded when necessary, and not hard coded when necessary
Related to this EHR tip is understanding when the EHR company has chosen to hard code certain fields or work flows. You’ll be surprised how many EHR have hard coded work flows with no way to change them. In some cases, that’s fine and even beneficial. However, in many other cases, it could really cause you pain in dealing with their hard coded work flows.

Realize which parts of the EHR can be changed/modified and which ones you’re stuck with (at least until the next release..or the next release….or the next release…).

38. You can move to population based medicine
You’re brave to do population based medicine on paper. Computers are great at crunching and displaying the data for this.

37. Safety is created by design
Just because you use an EHR doesn’t mean you don’t need great procedures that ensure safety. Sure, EHRs have some things built in to help with safety, but more often than not it’s a mixture of EHR functionality and design that results in safety. Don’t throw out all your principles of safety when you implement your EHR.

36. Medication Reconciliation should be a simple process
I’m not sure we’ve hit the holy grail of medication reconciliation in an EHR yet, but we’re getting closer. It’s worth the time to make this happen and will likely be required in the future.

If you want to see my analysis of the other 101 EMR and EHR tips, I’ll be updating this page with my 101 EMR and EHR tips analysis. So, click on that link to see the other EMR tips.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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