Tips on Adopting EMR for Your Office

Like any new software, EMR and EHR can be difficult to implement in a small practice. You have to get your staff acquainted with the system, and work through any kinks they may find. Along the way, you’ll also likely to need support in-house and over the phone.

There are shortcuts to find and your staff will need to adjust to a new method of doing things. The end result will be to personalize patient care and, actually, there may be Federal incentives for you to implement EMRs in your office.

Start Small

Your staff will benefit most from small introductions that get them interacting with EMR software. Start by ditching the photocopier and having staff enter patient information into your electronic medical record software. Inquire with your provider about training documentation, which is often included with the costs you pay for the software, and arrange for staff to spend an hour each day going over training materials and interacting with the software.

Break your staff up into teams that are responsible for different aspects of patient care. Depending on the size of our practice, you may have someone who handles patient intake, and someone else who handles prescription data.

Make sure everyone in your office understands how to retrieve medical records. It also helps to designate staff to go over each other’s work and check it for accuracy.

Designate a Go-To Person

Choose a member of your team to thoroughly train on the program and let that person break the software.

You need someone technologically capable, as well as someone who can patiently work through troubleshooting. Designate this person as a point of contact, and refer all EMR challenges to her.

Find the Shortcuts

Create a master list of shortcuts that cut down on keystrokes and clicks to get to what the staff needs.

Simple keystrokes like copy (Ctrl+C) and paste (Ctrl+V) will help save time. You can usually press “Tab” to cycle through the various text fields and speed up data entry, instead of clicking a mouse.

Encourage information sharing on free cloud services like Google Docs or Microsoft SkyDrive. Have staff maintain spreadsheets and documents online for keystrokes and tips. Creating a central knowledge base will give staff a safe space to learn more about the EMR if they choose.

Have a Backup Solution

Keep any patient data on a local hard drive, an external hard drive and in the cloud. You can purchase a reasonably large external hard drive or NAS server from any online retailer for less than $300. Cloud storage can be pricey, depending on what you need to store, as they often charge by what you need. The advantage is you pay for what you need, but you will end up spending more money over time. You will also need to scale those services as your practice grows, which may entail switching providers or upgrading plans.

If possible, have your IT staff create an automated backup system. Smaller practices without an IT staff should consider outsourcing the work to someone from the Web. Web based EMR applications typically have a backup system in place that requires almost no input on your part beyond initial setup.

Other Tips

Use templates and pre-written statements to fill in common patient symptoms and save time. Once your staff has entered the patient’s prescription, you can tell the patient that her prescription has already been sent to the pharmacist, which is great for patient satisfaction.

Government incentives, like the Medicare EMR Incentive program can help ease the transition with some extra cash. In the case of the Medicare EMR, you receive $44,000 over 5 years, which can cover the costs of purchasing the system or paying for training.

The above guest post is a guest blog entry.