Keys to Success

The right technology is only half the secret to successfully implementiong an EHR. Other factors having to do with how your office functions are critical as you redesign what you do from top to bottom. The concepts make it much easier to implement effective health information technology:

Patient focus: Addressing your patients' needs with the correct care in an effection manner is the central focus of the office. Information technology acts as a tremendous facilitator if it is implemented and used with patient focus in mind.
Teamwork philosophy: Transitioning and working with an electronic health record requires close teamwork. Nurses and medical assistants must work in close coordination in order to get patient care accomplished real-time. Empower your staff to do significantly more than usually occurs in a paper-based office. This, in turn, allows continual improvement and new ideas.
Cross training: Significantly more staff, including physicians, need to cross-train in order to be familiar with other job functions. In large offices, it is sometimes useful to break up the staff into smaller, more functional patient care units This will also require cross training.
Job rotation: A new computerized office environment rewards non-traditional thinking about job descriptions. The thinking should transition from "everyone has a job to do" to "what tasks are necessary, performed by whom, to achieve efficient workflow with minimal waste." Some examples are as follows:

The physician, instead of delegating prescription calls in to the pharmacy, is now able to complete the task himself quicker than delegating the task because of electronic mail or digital faxing. Some of these tasks that the physician can now do faster than delegating them is counterintuitive to the conventional wisdom that a physician should only be doing tasks that are generating revenue.
The medical assistant or nurse is now able to capture more of the patient history by using guidelines and prompting.
The front office staff, medical assistant and nurse are now able to refill prescriptions and answer questions because of previous guidelines set up by the physicians and office staff.
The patient not only has more autonomy with regard to medical decisions, but is now put to work entering his or her history to be reviewed at the time of the office visit.