Raise your hand if your hospital’s last electronic health record (EHR) implementation didn't exactly go to plan. Maybe registration clerks were stuck waiting for system responses, or perhaps inflexible workflows led to frustrated patients who just wanted to feel better.
Visions of efficient workflows and better patient care often get overshadowed by workarounds and more time away from patients, but EHRs don’t have to be this way.
Collaborate across your organization to tailor an advanced system for efficiency and care delivery. We’ll show you what it takes to master your EHR implementation, from designing what you need to avoiding common pitfalls.
At best, a successful EHR implementation simplifies documentation and data entry, offers better organization, and frees up time to focus on patients and hospital success.
At worst? Patient safety, clinician satisfaction, and organizational effectiveness all suffer. But you need to get it right for your long-term future, and that hinges on a few factors.
A well-designed EHR should feel familiar and easy to use. As you move through your project, strive to provide a consistent experience across all modules so each one works and feels similar to reduce the learning curve for healthcare professionals.
It’s all about balance. The system should maintain a core approach to suit your unique needs while also being flexible enough to work for various facilities’ needs and compliance requirements. Juno EHR reduces training time and staff frustration by being intuitive and consistent while ensuring hospitals stay compliant with healthcare regulations from the start.
In every EHR implementation, someone needs to get the team on board. Hospital leadership sets the tone by explaining why the change is happening and how it will help everyone do their jobs better.
However, one thing to be mindful of is that leaders don’t always consider workflow complexities and technical constraints when they set timelines. In their excitement, high expectations can create pressure to deliver that can harm the project.
Project champions—the leaders and staff members who learn the new system first and help everyone else get up to speed—are a strong source of support for a new EHR. These healthcare personnel should not only be savvy, charismatic, and respected but also willing—because volunteers believe more strongly in the project to promote the tech and facilitate engagement among their peers.
Champions provide value throughout an implementation project. Across development, they map out current workflows for the new system to fix, and once it’s time to deploy, they contribute their competencies to streamline EHR adoption. Champions provide personalized at-the-elbow support, fielding questions and providing training that aligns with your workflows to help users learn a new EHR.
A successful EHR implementation provides features and benefits to achieve both patient and organizational goals. Tailor workflows to your needs through system-wide personalization. Streamline tasks to relieve documentation burdens, improve data entry, and reduce errors. With a fully interoperable EHR, you can seamlessly share data across providers to simplify communication, support clinical decision-making, and improve satisfaction and outcomes.
Everything from leadership support to workflow planning comes together in an EHR project. But a few key factors can make or break the process.
Weigh system progress against the planned timeline to hit your targets. The most important stakeholders—such as leaders—are usually the busiest. They often miss project meetings, adding more sessions to the calendar to get project updates and extending project timelines.
If your EHR implementation veers way off course, reassess your deployment sequencing. In this situation, you have two choices:
For a new EHR implementation to take hold, the broader team needs to be involved from the start. Project champions should communicate the benefits to build trust in the new way of working, organizing training by job functions before the system goes live.
Design your training to begin with essential tasks, such as patient lookup, documentation, and order entry, before moving on to hands-on practice with the modules and workflows each role will regularly use.
For an eager hospital, waiting can feel like the most difficult part of its EHR implementation. Get to the other side of the rainbow and enjoy a new way of working by planning for and responding to common challenges.
Worried the vendor will leave you hanging after a quick tutorial? Or that every change and enhancement you need will get lost in their endless queue of tasks?
Without vendor support, many staffers are stuck calling coworkers to troubleshoot or settle for workarounds that zap the EHR’s intended benefits. Choose an EHR vendor that supports your needs and makes you the priority.
Advanced EHRs are supposed to eliminate siloes, so don’t let yours create more. If teams and stakeholders don’t talk to one another, there’s no way to work in the same direction, resulting in misaligned expectations, incorrect or duplicated efforts, and potential risks to patient safety.
EHR implementations take at least six months and have lots of moving parts. The pressure impacts everyone involved—vendors, client teams, frontline trainers, and implementation specialists—as they work to meet demand.
Some EHRs are developed as minimally marketable products, delivered with the bare minimum features to function rather than as complete systems. This approach can cause multiple problems that directly impact implementation success, including:
A successful EHR implementation leaves no stone unturned. By combining the right mix of features and teamwork, you can create a solution that drives measurable results for staff and patients.
But don’t get stymied by communication issues, tight timelines, or half-finished solutions. Write your organization’s next chapter with an advanced EHR solution, such as Juno EHR.
Switching is easy. Juno EHR has a familiar look and feel for those who have used other platforms, and it’s fully verified by the healthcare industry’s top compliance standards:
Plus, we’re always here to help. Every EHR implementation comes with 24/7/365 automated monitoring to prevent system downtime. We’ll also provide role-based team training, encouraging system adoption so your organization can fully leverage the platform.
Book your demo today and change the way your organization approaches its EHR implementation!