Let the madness begin
If you have not already heard, The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has announced that they will be prepared to start cutting checks for meaningful use of EHR’s in May of 2011. Now that CMS has set a hard deadline for opening the government checkbook to physicians, many physicians are going to be scurrying to get their practices “meaningful use” ready.
This is the perfect time to remind physicians and practice admins that while you should be working on your road map to EHR integration, moving your plans up, skipping important milestones, or bypassing slow training schedules in order to get to the finish line faster is a tempting, but bad idea. First of all, as most of our clients have heard before (we preach it all the time), EHR’s have no finish line. They are never done. And expecting one to be fully integrated and requiring no more attention is a big (and expensive) mistake to make! EHR’s should be seen as a tool that will require ongoing maintenance.
EHR’s on the whole are very disruptive to the traditional flow of a practice. Every bit of deliberate planning and time-consuming training for your staff is going to pay off in the end. Trust me on this. Circumventing your implementation/training/go live plan for the sake of getting your EHR up and running faster will result in mistakes, some of them potentially costly. All of the exaggerated attention that is being given to the fast approaching deadlines (artificial deadlines, at that, lest we forget this is the government we are talking about here) serve only to make practice owners feel as though the entire world is passing them by. Trust me, this is not the case.
In the end, every practice and physician should be giving serious consideration to their EHR plans. Keep in mind throughout the entire process that a successful selection and implementation plan begins and ends with careful planning that will suffer if you decide to shorten it in order to get to that mystical finish line (and paycheck) sooner. Be the tortoise, not the hare!
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Softworks is a healthcare IT company solving security, compliance, infrastructure and management concerns for medical practices and small hospitals. Our goal is to serve our clients by using technology in a way that will help them become more proficient in their business and more effective in the care of their patients. 
