As I work with various clients who are preparing for transition to EHRs, I often hear HIM staff voice concerns that they haven’t been invited to the table for discussions regarding EHR strategy. In some cases, the selection of an entire system has been made for the facility with literally no input from the HIM department!
It comes up every other day now, it seems. It’s the question with no good answer; you’re sure of it. But your staff members really want to know: Why can’t they eat at their desks?
Where is the healthcare community at in terms of EHR implementation, and where is it going from here? And what effect, if any, has the EHR meaningful use incentive program had on implementation efforts? MRB asked these and other questions in our July 2010 benchmarking survey on EHRs—and HIM professionals from 325 hospitals and facilities answered.
If you’ve been outsourcing your transcription but think there might be a better way to meet your needs in-house, you may want to take another look at some other options. You may have more than you realize.
Regardless of the safeguards in place in any electronic document management system (EDMS), sometimes a document ends up in the wrong patient’s record. It was a reality in the paper world, and it is a reality in the scanned record world. Obviously, it was easier to rectify in the paper environment. So how does one address this issue with a hybrid electronic record?