Choosing The Right EMR Vendor

WHAT VENDOR IS RIGHT FOR ME?

With over 400 EMR vendors in the marketplace today, it is common to feel overwhelmed by the choices that lay before you. Many physicians feel some anxiety about choosing the ‘right’ vendor or the ‘right’ product. The guidelines in this brochure will help you to select the best product for your needs.

Start by clearly defining your needs. You want to make decisions about EMR products based on your functional needs and how closely a particular product matches your needs. Write down the top 10 or 20 functions you want an EMR to do for you. What are they? Produce consult notes? Store lab data? Keep copies of your existing scanned paper charts? Produce e-scripts? Read your EMR mission statement and include some of those priorities.

Make a scorecard of functional requirements. Turn your wish list into a scorecard, with room to write notes by each category for each vendor that you see. Develop a simple scoring system (1-5 will do) and assign a value to each category based on how well that product performs. Evaluate all vendors based on the same list.

Make a short-list of vendors. Now that you have your list of functional requirements, it’s time to make a list of vendors you would like to investigate. Some companies can be eliminated quickly if they haven’t been around long enough or don’t deal with a certain size practice or a particular specialty.

The next section will guide you how to locate vendor choices. Many professional medical societies and other organizations have member-only listservs that allow professionals to openly and honestly discuss their experience with particular vendors and their implementation progress.

Look at the corporate Web sites of vendors to help determine the maturity of the vendor, such as years in business, total money allocated to research and development, number of total clients and installations, etc. Also, note if there are physician owners or advisors on staff.

Is the vendor active in national EMR leadership task forces, such as the Electronic Health Records Vendors Association (www.himssehrva.org) or the Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology (www.cchit.org), a voluntary, private-sector initiative that seeks to certify HIT products? Their recommendations and research can help you to feel confident that you have selected a good program.

Obtain neutral third party reports like KLAS, the AC Group Tool, TEPR or the Forrester Report and see where common vendors rank against their peers. Some of these reports are free and some are available only for a subscription fee.

Attend EMR conferences and road shows that typically let you see several products at the same time. Use an EMR selection tool or report to help you to compare multiple vendors on a wide variety of criteria.

Read articles on the Web (your professional society will be a good resource) or in professional journals.

Talk to your colleagues and ask potential vendor partners for references of their own. Visit offices that are using the EMR solution you are considering. You will learn a lot about the product and its ease of use from a simple site visit. People are eager to share their experience and ‘lessons learned’ with you.

Consider issuing a request for proposal (RFP). This is a standardized, formal document that tells the vendor a little bit about you and what you’re looking for, and allows them to tell you about their company and their product. Reviewing a handful of these documents gives you a better idea of whether or not the product is going to fit your needs and saves you the time of sitting through a product demo for something that is truly not going to work for your practice. A sample RFP can be found at www.medqic.org (in the ‘Search’ box type ‘sample request for proposal’).

You can contact MichaelPaquin at  Michael@mdpgrp.com