5 Steps That Stop EHR Hassles for Good

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• 5 Steps That Stop EHR Hassles for Good
• Feel like your EHR system is a sputtering old
  jalopy? Theres a 50/50 chance its a
  high-performance machine you havent fully
  optimized. Many practices think they need to
  ditch their old systems to solve their EHR
  problems, but they may well have a Ferrari
  sitting on blocks,
• says MGMA presenter Taraq Mazher. If you
  determine youre better off staying with your
  current EHR system, here are the first steps to a
  tune up.
• Get broad input from all the people who work in
  your
• practice. Usually there are one or two squeaky
  wheels who cant wait to catalog everything
  thats wrong with the EHR. What this small sample
  says may be the truth, but its only a sliver of
  the truth. To get a full, true picture, you need
  input from everyone in multiple rolesclinicians,
  back office, front officeabout whats working
  well and whats going wrong. Mazher and co-
  presenter Michelle Holmes suggest you use a
  survey to gather data about each users
  experience. You can find sample questions for
  each phase of EHR use/implementation.
• Form a steering committee. Heres what happens at
  many practices. One clinician is unhappy and
  wants just one little change. He goes to the IT
  guy one-on-one and gets it done. Too many
  non-centralized, one-shot changes and you end up
  with an EHR held together with wire and duct tape
  that no one can navigate well. Its been
  customized for everyone and therefore works for
  no one. To optimize your EHR, you must set up an
  organizational structure that gets input from
  everyone but implements changes only if they make
  sense for everyone.
• Find a physician champion. Your typical clinician
  would rather drop a bowling ball on his foot than
  think about EHR. But most practices have one
  physician whos technically savvy and wants to
  think about it, says Holmes. Get that doctor on
  the steering committee so s/he can get input and
  cooperation from physician peers. Compensate the
  physician for time spent away from patients with
  proxy RVUs, Mazher suggests.
• Break up youre training into small chunks. Give
  each short training session a takeaway gem that
  immediately makes the users EHR experience
  easier. If your practice is on the larger side,
  consider easy-to- schedule repeats. Mazher has
  successfully offered the same 20-minute
  lunch-and-learn topic several times in one week,
  giving EHR users plenty of opportunities to pop
  in for a quick shot of training.
• Over-communicate. Most practices find that their
  EHR users are frustrated because they never
  really learned how to use the system in the

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first place. Once its time to retain, use
multiple channels to get your message across.
Tailor your messages to different learning
styles. For example, internal websites or emails
help some people learn, but lots of physicians
never look at that stuff. So, supplement these
materials with your lunch-and-learns and with
paper flyers that you post in clinician areas.