Welcome to EMR and HIPAA

No one really likes dealing with sales people. There is just a general feeling of mistrust that usually exists around salespeople. However, it is important that you create a good relationship of trust with that person so you can ask good questions. During an EMR demo you will see a lot of great features on the ideal system. Unfortunately, it is often the ideal system for a specific office for which it was designed. If your office is ideal then there isn’t a problem.

Since you are still reading I assume that you don’t have the ideal office(not to mention it doesn’t exist). This means that your office is going to have to adapt to the EMR software. Don’t expect the EMR software to adapt to you. Even with the most reactive customer service friendly EMR(which I consider mine to be at the top in this area), it just takes time to make changes to software, test them and then deliver them to the customer. So, the ease or difficulty in implementing a software depends on how close the software mimics your method of doing business.

Let me give an example for those visual learners. One of my evaluating clinicians asked, “Can your EMR handle a walk in ONLY system?” The EMR vendor had some great features to handle walk ins and intermix them into a clinicians schedule. However, somehow the ONLY was missed in a sales communication. It would have been much better to ask the EMR vendor, “How can your EMR handle a walk in ONLY system?” Then, follow it up with the question, “Can I see it?” Now you can actually envision what this EMR vendor would be like in your “ideal office” and what you would need to adapt to use that EMR in your environment.

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