ElectronicHealthcare
Why Does It Take So Long to Adopt an EMR? Part 1 of 2: A Model of the Effects of Socio-Technical Factors on Physician Office Productivity
We sought to understand the drivers and influencers that affect the time needed to adopt a health information management system in primary care offices. The results from three independent but interrelated studies were crystallized to understand how socio-technical factors affect the adoption of physician office systems. The duration of the adoption period is affected by differences between the culture and workflow of a clinic and the workflow design of its health information management software. While customized software could make adoption seamless, the cost of such systems drives physician offices to select a commercial off-the-shelf system from a list of systems pre-qualified by the jurisdictional certification organization. Jurisdictional physician office certification programs maximize the fit between physician office and health information systems by selecting a wide range of solutions to fit different practice types.
Comments
Raymond Simkus wrote:
Posted 2010/06/29 at 02:23 PM EDT
This is a very through article and review of issues around adoption of EMRs. It was interesting to see the comment related to customization of software that would potentially allow for a better fit with the office workflow. This is a very valuable concept but the challenge is where is user customizability most valuable and what should the choices be at each point. One of the problems is that some offices have become very good at doing things the wrong way. The other problem is that the foundation of the EMR application needs to be built to handle customization. To take full advantage of what EMRs could do a great deal of consideration should be given to how data collected once can be reused and repurposed. Having linkages between different components of the EMR are often neglected. For example when writing a prescription to be able to see the current problem list and selected lab results and current medications would be very helpful. The next thing would be to link the prescription to one or more entries in the Problem List. Without these things being in place the EMR would basicially function as an expensive computer based version of the paper chart. It could be much more than that.
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