EHR Readiness Assessment: The right way to do it

Electronic Health Records (EHR) have become the common solace to almost all hospitals and clinics worldwide.

Although its growth helps the healthcare spectrum, when it comes to implementing an EHR, is still a complicated process. This can be managed by carrying out a simple EHR readiness assessment before the implementation. This readiness assessment makes your facility ready to welcome the new system.

What is EHR Readiness Assessment?

The process of assessing the readiness of a medical facility to implement a new EHR system is called “EHR Readiness Assessment”. It is a phase in the implementation process that helps the facility to be ready before digitalizing to an EHR for the first time.

This process is vital for the safety of the facility while transforming paper records into electronic records. 

When a facility wants to switch from one EHR to another due to the inability to handle the data load, conducting an “EHR optimization” is important. This assesses the aspects of the facility to find potential problems and handle them before implementation. This makes sure everything’s in place before implementation. EHR implementation is a costly process and facilities cannot afford to make any mistakes. This can be avoided with a thorough assessment of readiness by the practice.

RELATED: EHR Telehealth Integration: How Vozo Helps In Tackling Your Hardest Challenges

EHR Readiness Assessment: Areas to concentrate

Concentrating more on the following areas will help produce a thorough result.

1. Operational fitness

Includes;

• Managing vendor relationships
• EHR policies and protocols
• Staffing requirements 
• Training for staff engaged in EHR integration.

2. Management & leadership

• This phase evaluates the facility’s fitness to manage the present and future human resource requirements. 
• This requires management focus and process development.
• This phase has four parts;
  • Strategic issues like costs for security, support, etc.
  • Financial & business issues like budget for the present and future room for the new system.
  • Care management is like improving quality and conducting a quality assurance process.
  • Quality improvement with strategic plans for improving clinical efficiency.

3. Organizational values

• This part evaluates the perception of the organization of the EHR. It includes the reviews of patients, staff, and physicians.
• It helps decide the team members who are willing to cooperate with implementing an EHR.
• It evaluates procedures for patient-EHR interaction & advises changes and corrections to health data.
• It helps to understand the project plan development with variables like timeline, dependency, accountability, and allocating EHR formation tasks.

4. Technical fitness

• This phase evaluates the medical facility’s technical environment and its IT talents. 
• This assesses the techs that are already in use, staffing for implementation & infrastructure issues.

RELATED: Ambulatory EHR vs Inpatient EHR: Which one is for your practice?

EHR Readiness Assessment: Technical areas to focus

The basic technical areas to focus on for the assessment are;

1. Infrastructure

• The way the system externally shares data
• Desktop per staff member, their operating systems, mainframe availability, hardware and software
• The way it internally connects departments located separately

2. Architecture

• Portal availability, layered structure of communication & operating systems
• Measuring service orientation through the services of IT departments, infrastructure, and automated services

3. Process

• The quantity of data fed manually
• Support system availability and automation
• The way the customer is notified

EHR Software from Vozo

Vozo cloud-based EHR software provides a sophisticated, customizable, and integrated EHR. It saves physicians and practices from documentation burdens.

Our customizable templates let physicians view patient records & create case notes, and more from a single screen. Vozo RCM integrated with EHR & PM software offers greater efficiency and cost savings across the board. Our specialty-specific tools improve workflow, billing, scheduling, and documentation. 

Our features include e-prescribing, security, patient portals, lab integration, cloud hosting, and more. We offer the best means of ICD-10 standards which minimizes your administrative work.

“Let’s increase your practice’s productivity, compliance & security with a perfectly fitting EHR”