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BLOG: Three truths about EHR
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Read more from John A. Hovanesian, MD, FACS.
Dan Steen, one of my mentors in residency and a brilliant surgeon, once told me, “John, you don’t want to be the first guy doing a new procedure, but you don’t want to be the last.”
Those same words ring true for the adoption of technology in the office; while leading edge is good, it’s best to avoid the scars that come from being the very first to use raw tech products — the so-called bleeding edge.
Our practice was a very early adopter of electronic health records, obtaining our system almost 15 years ago. We certainly gained some scars along the way, but we were lucky enough to adopt a package that has emerged as one of the leaders in eye care. Here are the three most important lessons we’ve learned:
1. It’s not easy. No system is ready for use out of the box. Expect significant effort to customize any system to your needs. The investment of effort you make will pay off with greater efficiencies and revenue, but not from the start.
2. Think of IT not as an expense but as an investment. Mark Rosenberg, the administrator of the large Barnet Dulaney Perkins practice in Phoenix, first shared this concept with me, and it really rings true. Just as we invest in keeping our office and equipment up-to-date, so we must now do so with our computer systems.
3. EHR must work for you, not the other way around. In the beginning, every task in EHR is cumbersome and more time consuming than using paper. But if you use the adoption of EHR as an opportunity to look at every process in your office and streamline your workflow, the gains will be obvious. We are using our own electronic medical record system to increase our optical capture rate, track glaucoma patients who might have missed visual fields, make sure every diabetic patient’s primary care physician gets a faxed report and track surgical patients who have not yet scheduled a procedure. None of these features were ready to go in the software as we purchased it, nor did implementing these processes cost very much in programmer time, but all of these features have received unanimous approval from our doctors and staff as to their value.
If you think of EHR adoption as an opportunity to improve your practice rather than an unfunded mandate, you’ll still have some bleeding edge moments, but with each incremental change that improves your processes you’ll recognize how technology, properly managed, genuinely helps you take better care of patients.