Welcome to EMR and HIPAA

There are a ton of questions that you should ask when doing an EMR site visit. Yes, I’m not going to even address that you should do a site visit. If you don’t think you should, then just plan on your EMR implementation to fail. Ok, that might be a small exaggeration, but not by much. A site visit to see the EMR software working and to ask questions from actual users of the system should be an essential part of any EMR selection process.

Here’s a few questions you might want to ask when you’re doing an EMR site visit (Thanks Elsie):

* Was the amount and quality of training sufficient?
* How did you go about minimizing productivity loss during implementation?
* Are interfaces with lab, PMS, etc. functioning to your expectations?
* Where there any unexpected costs?
* Name three things that would make the system better.
* What are the three best features of the EHR?

I think we could list 100 more, but these are a couple good questions that will start some conversation. Having a good conversation is the key, because conversation will prompt you to ask other questions which you might not have thought of before the visit.