Welcome to EMR and HIPAA

I’m currently attending the PCCHA conference which is basically the college health association conference for the west coast. The conference has been quite interesting. A few of the sessions ended up being quite useful, but more than anything it was just fun for me to talk to all of the various people working in the college health community. Most of my conversations centered around EHR and EMR implementation, but it was also fun to see these other college health professionals jealous of the really state of the art facilities we have on our campus.

My presentation on EMR went quite well and I think that many of the people in the audience got some useful information. At least that’s my hope. It was fun to present on EMR and the things we’ve learned. The interesting thing for me was that as I talked to people about EMR and EHR and using it in college health, I realized that over the past two years I’ve really learned a lot about what it takes to implement an EHR into a clinic. It can certainly be a daunting task if you look at all the intricacies.

In the end, my message to most of the people that I talked to was that while implementing an EHR can be overwhelming, it’s important to take small bite size pieces of it and accomplish those. Then, move on to the next problem and the next. The reality is that 2.5 years after implementing our EMR system, we’re still adding, modifying and changing our processes to be more effective.