One of the most underutilized methods of evaluating and selecting an EMR software has to be the collection of EMR references. How would you want to get into a contract that spans over multiple years if you cannot buy a laptop without conducting some research first? It’s not a wise choice to simply rely on what was promised by the company.
Apart from the identification of various tips and tricks to better utilize such systems, user feedback can help physicians get a holistic view of the product, which is imperative for new providers to experience.
Ideally, physicians should participate with their staff, although for higher productivity, work can be split between staff members. This would essentially allow participants to evaluate questions and answers and get to the solution themselves, enabling a better understanding for the overall system and establishing peer to peer level of communication between them. Visiting the reference site in person or conversing over the phone may help in providing a more personalized outlook, while the practice may adopt multiple ways of communication, ensuring a better understanding between them in reference to the issues each user experiences.
Physicians should also make sure that they find other practices by joining user communities or professional societies and ask about their experience with the vendor in question. Once that has been done, the following questionnaire can help in determining if your desired vendor is worth the time and investment.
- How long has the practice been using the EMR solution?
- How long did it take for the implementation to complete?
- How was the implementation experience?
- How long was the training process?
- Were the allocated training hours adequate?
- Did the application appear to be as easy as seen in the demonstration?
- How much of the annotation process is templates driven?
- Has the documentation process improved since implementation?
- How many patients were seen in a day before and after the implementation?
- How would they rate the quality of the exam note? Pre and Post implementation.
- Has the use of paper charts been completely eliminated?
- Did they consider or use scribes? If yes, what about the cost and quality?
- How would they rate their overall experience? And would they recommend the EMR to another practice?
The above list, tells you the main questions you can ask about your vendor, but it is by no means the ideal list or should be used as it is. You should always know what you want with your vendor, and cater your list and questions based upon what you require from them, by asking if the services they provided to different physicians and practices had been satisfactory or not.
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