MedTech I.Q.

The Cutting Edge of Medical Technology Content, Community & Collaboration

EHR Adoption is Business Process Change: Not Technology Adoption Alone!

August 26, 2009 Nari Kannan Leave a comment

EHR adoption or Non-adoption as I see it, is not because of Physicians alone! Lots of other people need to change the way they practice medicine, not just the Physicians!

Success or Failure of EHR adoption is often laid at the feet of Physicians. They are technology-averse, they are not comfortable with computers, etc. However it appears that everyone from the Office Manager or the person at the reception at the practice, to the Nurses and Physicians’ Assistants, to the backoffice billing persons or third party billing companies are all affected by an EHR implementation.

Paper records are so easy to use that not much attention is paid when they are used by these different people during a visit to the doctor’s office. However, when the same practice starts using EHR, you have a single Electronic Visit or Encounter record that gets started up by the person at the front office, the nurse may update the vitals section of this visit, and then the Physician fills out the rest of the information up to diagnosis, prescriptions or tests to be performed. Then others may take over and complete the rest of the visit and the information goes to billing.

Now you can see that the entire business process needs to be mapped and addressed properly with training for everyone involved. They all need to buy in, be comfortable with the new way of doing things on the computer and start doing all of these in a coordinated manner.

The tough thing is that ANY of these interested parties can cause the failure of the whole system if they do not do their part properly in the EHR but it takes ALL of them to do it properly for it to be successful.

Thinking of EHR rollouts, especially in smaller and medium sized practices as a technology rollout is a disaster in the making! If the whole thing is not considered a fundamental change in the way business is done and then ALL the parties trained properly in doing their part with the EHR, the whole thing will fall apart!

Views: 13

Comment

You need to be a member of MedTech I.Q. to add comments!

Join MedTech I.Q.

Comment by CC-Conrad Clyburn-MedForeSight on August 27, 2009 at 2:50pm
Bari,

Well said.

Often we get so focused on the technical challenges that we forget that most IT projects fail as a result of the "Human Element". Equal measures of skill and attention must be focused at both getting the technology correct and in bringing along the human buy-in to systems change. Thank you for reminding us all.

CC

© 2024   Created by CC-Conrad Clyburn-MedForeSight.   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service