Healthcare Failures Magazine (HFM) “It is not everyone who can finish dead last in the CIO of the Year competition. How do you account for your total lack of accomplishment?”
PR: “It was not as easy as it may appear. I think it had to do with believing that my EHR vendor knew more about running a hospital than did we.”
HFM “Why do you say that?”
PR: “They told me their EHR it had been implemented “As Is” at a number of hospitals and was running fine. I was convinced that all hospitals are basically the same; admissions, treatment, discharge. Besides, it saved a lot of money not having to customize it and do all that stuff about workflows.”
HFM “What about the change management?”
PR: “Yeah, well I guess you could say that part kind’a blew up on me. It didn’t take long to learn that our hospital didn’t function at all like their software. According to our doctors, they didn’t think this vendor had ever been in a hospital, let alone run one.”
Who defines your vision? Who is your chief imaginist, the person responsible for defining the type of hospital you hope to operate five years from now? Do you want it to be your EHR vendor? Probably not? Is it your vendor? It may well be. Why? Do you want to outsource your imagination and your future to your vendor?
Without a detailed and comprehensive work flow improvement and change management program the only thing you will implement is your EHR vendor’s vision of how a hospital should function. You’ll be just like each of their other clients. Is that what your business model calls for, is it satisfactory?
Pale Rhino Consulting 
Hi Paul,
I truly understand some of the questions posed by you, which seems to be in line with the challenges that not only have I faced personally but also have my other practicing physicians.
I completely buy you point about the right business models but the fact is that like hospitals or private physicians even the EHR vendors have a business model.
What is important for a practice is to not only judge the EHR vendors by their product features but also have a look at the overall business or physician outreach ( references ) of those vendors.
Each specialty EHR has its own set of challenges or requirements which I believe is overlooked by in most EHR vendors in a effort to merely follows federal guidelines. This is resulting in low usability to the practitioners, thus less ROI, finally redundancy of the EHR solution in place.
I think ROI is very important factor that should be duly considered when look achieve a ‘meaning use’ out of a EHR solution. Though one may get vendors providing ‘meaning use’ at a lower cost, their ROI / savings through the use of their EHR might be pretty low when compared to costlier initial investment. Found a pretty useful ROI tool that is pretty customizable and easy to use. It also accounts for the different specialty EHR’s too.
Also the introduction of REC’s through the HITECH act. is a great way to avail of quality EHR solutions at competitive prices. The stiff competition among not only these REC’s but also among EHR vendors ( to become a preferred vendor of a given REC) will result in lot of positives to medical practioners.
Looking at the funding provided to the REC’s, the staggered grant allocation system also promises to be an unbiased way of allocating funds. It will also help in the concept of not only REC’s or EHR vendors but also helping out practices in managing and creating their unique business model. It can be one of the possible answers to the ’safe vendor challenge’ as discussed by many critics.
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I appreciate you taking the time to comment.
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