Welcome to EMR and HIPAA

In my recent post about EMR site visits, I got a comment from prakash about what questions a doctor should ask an EMR vendor. He gave me the following list of preliminary questions:

What is the cost per physician license?
Do you have any existing clients in our specialty?
Does your system come pre-loaded with templates for my specialty?
Is your company the developers of the software or is it re-branded from another vendor?
Is your system client/server based or ASP based?
Does your system include practice management software?
How many clients does your company have?
Is your system HL7 compliant?
How long has your company been in business?
Is your development done overseas?
Is support done overseas?
Is your software CCHIT certified? If not, why?
How often is the software updated?

I don’t think this is nearly a comprehensive list of questions. In fact, I think it just is the tip of the iceberg. I also would consider changing some of the way the questions are phrased. However, I thought it was a good starting point that could be built out over time. In fact, I think I’m going to make a static page on this website for these type of questions.

Hopefully, my valuable readers will continue to point me to other good resources that might have a nice list of questions that I can continue to compile into a valuable resource for those searching for an EMR. Just post a comment if you have other questions you think should be asked or know of other resources and I’ll continue to compile questions for EMR vendors.

Thanks Prakash.

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