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Is Your Staff Ready for Electronic Medical Records?

Written by: Peter Polack

Article Overview: The staff must be on-board with the new EMR project in order to have success. It's important to prepare your employees so that they can effectively use the system from the beginning.

Is Your Staff Ready for Electronic Medical Records?

The impact of change upon staff is too often forgotten in electronic medical records implementation projects. Do you believe your employees are ready for the drastic changes resulting from moving to electronic records? How will you train people to use the new system with adequate proficiency, and who needs to know what? The staff's perceptions are critical in measuring overall effectiveness of the system, and ultimately to success. It's necessary to put people first. Many medical practices have most of the staff inputting data using basic typing and writing skills. When we converted our EPM to NextGen from Medical Manager, we changed from a DOS-keyboard-stroke data entry system to a mouse-operated Windows menu. At first this may seem a small difference, but this ended up as a stressful change fro staff who had previously enjoyed the comfort of doing things in another way. When making the transition over to the new system, files suddenly started to disappear. Printouts were showing up at remote offices miles away from the printer. It definitely took some time to hone in on the system and operate it correctly.

As we prepared our technical staff to implement electronic medical records, we set up a computer classroom to teach system basics. When we transitioned to our new EPM we put a few staff members in the classroom at a time, making a basic skill assessment and issuing some training. The staff members had a chance to use the newly-trained skills by calling patients to verify appointment times, meanwhile entering information into the database. This helped make the training time more valuable, as we used this chance to update our scheduling and contact information.

After training was complete, the employee was expected to have a basic familiarity with a suite of Windows functions. Users should also understand some basic computer skills including drives, files, folders, paths, and logging out.

An electronic medical records system has its own functions and terminology to be familiar with. Employees will need to be able to tell the difference between regular and active images, and between data grids, pick-lists, and pop-ups. Everything works best when your staff has a genuine interest which you work to develop. The basic details of your staff's aptitude and experience can be assessed quickly with short interviews and tests.

This is also the time to enact your security policy for all the computers on the system. How often will they be updated? What are the password requirements? What hardware will be used? What are the consequences for violating policy? Who will implement these security measures? In the current environment of HIPAA regulations, assuring security for patient records must be constantly maintained, a result of instilling the importance of policy in company procedure.

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  Medical Practices Beware! Time is Running Out To Avoid Electronic Medical Records Stimulus Penalties!

Article Tags: adequate proficiency, appointment times, basic computer, basic skill, computer classroom, computer skills, data entry system, drastic changes, electronic medical records, electronic records, epm, implementation projects, keyboard stroke, medical manager, medical practices, medical records system, skill assessment, windows functions, windows menu, writing skills



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