The implementation of an electronic medical or health records system is one of the most difficult tasks that any office could undertake.  Unfortunately, most offices do not have a thorough understanding of what is required for a successful implementation and do not allocate the necessary capital and time to do it right the first time.

A couple years ago, there was an alarming failure rate of around 50% for first time EMR implementations.  It still is quite common to find a practice that has changed EMR vendors in the past year because of unforeseen work flow issues, costs, or numerous other problems. There is not a singular approach to eliminating this possibility but instead are numerous things that one can do to decrease the likelihood of this.

Rarely does a practice spend less than 6 months selecting and planning for EMR without serious problems.  Selecting and Implementing the right EMR solution takes an exorbitant amount of time and there is no way around this. The biggest shortcut in selecting electronic medical records is in cost forecasting and analysis.  There is oftentimes little to no research done on the financial impact, both positive and negative, over the protracted pre, intra, and post EMR time periods.  I will post another article on strategies that will help make this financial evaluation more productive and accurate.