Healthcare providers have been embracing electronic medical record software (EMR) at an increasing rate. In this digital age, the allure of disruptive technologies can be a hard thing to resist, especially for healthcare organizations that have been using the same paper-based or legacy systems for decades. To counteract this, EMR systems can facilitate care delivery and help improve clinical productivity. However, it may not have the desired clinical impact if not properly implemented or correctly customized.
Most healthcare organizations go for major off-the-shelf EMR systems, but these systems can’t meet every need of every practice. Healthcare organizations that have implemented an off-the-shelf EMR systems, struggle to navigate through the available features. On the other hand, EMR Systems that are fully customized solutions for healthcare organizations typically come with a wealth of benefits and features which are user-friendly. This means that the system is fully aligned with your business needs.
Here are the reasons why you should go for a highly customized functional EMR solution:
- When most companies implement their EMR system, they do so to fulfill a business need or to resolve a business problem: Improve patient and provider interaction; reduce medical errors. When done properly, EMR implementation requires time, planning, training and testing. Only then can it deliver the expected results. When companies skip these steps, to save time or efforts, their EMR system is not going to be operating to its full potential.
- Your team is struggling with workflow disruptions: Does your team complain about the workflow disruptions or have trouble navigating it? If the answer is yes, then you’ve got a problem with your clinical workflow. Workflow disruptions should be taken very seriously and could be the main motive behind implementing EMR. It is crucial to create steady clinical workflows. You might experiment with different workarounds on your own, but an off-the-shelf EMR system implementation can mess up the workflow in a practice altogether. That’s why you should choose a customized system.
- EMR has missing data or data stored in a different location: Until the problem of “accessibility of information” is resolved, it’s nearly impossible for to achieve full visibility into patient profiles. Not having data visibility makes clinically relevant information inaccessible for decision making.
Examples of this data issue are:
- EMR teams sometimes wrongly enter data
- EMR data is stored the wrong location.
- Data is inaccessible to EMR teams
- An off-the-shelf EMR system does not align with your existing business processes: Implementing an EMR system should complement and enhance your current processes. If this is not the case, patients and providers will become frustrated and may even reject electronic.
- You don’t have time to manage to look into the technical ability of your computers: Once implemented, the most unfortunate thing a healthcare organization can do is to ‘set and forget’ their EMR system. Only with significant investments of time into understanding the technical ability of computer’s age and other infrastructure will you ever be able to retrieve and send EMR data.
- Off-the-shelf EMR systems can get complicated and costly: Customized EMR systems are designed for healthcare businesses to be able to maintain themselves. However, off-the-shelf EMR systems can be confusing and cost prohibitive for some practices.
Conclusion
Adopting a one size fits approach, doesn’t work for the complex EHR clinical workflows. With so many needs of specialty practices, sub-specialty practices and a range of compliance challenges a customized EHR solution ensures that all areas will be accounted for in the clinical process. Customized EHR systems bring a lot of benefits to meet your specific workflows and healthcare business requirements.
Since a customized solution is not as simple as ‘plug and play’, having a partner with expertise in healthcare IT solutions is the way to ensure it will be successfully designed and implemented. A skilled EMR systems partner, like Prime Technology Group, will take the time to learn about your business requirements, understand your technology challenges and goals. Prime Technology Group builds highly functional Electronic Medical Records systems / Electronic Healthcare Records (EMR/EHR) and Healthcare Data Management Systems that meet the specific needs of specialty and sub-specialty practices.
Our solutions portfolio is fully compliant with HIPAA security standards, HL7 messaging, and ONC certification standards. While remaining fully compliant with HIPAA security standards, HL7 messaging, and ONC certification standards, Prime EMR uses Prime’s cloud-based technology, Claimus, to seamlessly integrate with your current healthcare IT system regardless of its size.
For more information on how to get started with Prime, click here.
