Importance of a Healthcare Informatics Professional in EMR implementation!

As a part of an EMR Consultant Project Team, today we met with Port St. John (PSJ) Family Practice’s Office/Practice Manager to understand and discuss the scope of implementing a new EMR system. While developing the project plan – cost, IT uncertainties and lost productivity were defined as the three largest barriers in the implementation/adoption of an EMR system. However, after today’s meeting with the Office/Practice Manager, I realized that having a healthcare informatics professional who understands both health care and information technology aspects is critically important.

Before being enrolled into the program, I always viewed things from an IT perspective. Having a background in computers, my thinking was that everybody knows the basics – how to use a computer, how to open up a browser, how to access a website, etc. However, this is not the case in the real world. Similarly not every healthcare professional knows how to operate a computer since everything was paper-based prior to EMR system.

Prior to the agreements with our team, PSJ Family Practice already had an EMR system implemented, however, because of the EMR system being bought out by another company, PSJ Family Practice was left with no choice either to buy the company’s new EMR or to go with a completely new EMR system. So, PSJ Family Practice chose to go with a new EMR system. Having bad experience with prior EMR system, the Office/Practice Manager and other staff are aware of what to expect during the implementation of new EMR system. Bad experience also included misunderstandings as the practice did not know how IT world works, nor did the implementation team have enough knowledge on how the health care industry works. For example, when giving user’s access, the implementation team categorized all receptionists into one set of users (regardless of how long they have worked at the practice or their location or their positional category), all physicians as another set of users (regardless of them being a primary care physician, or a surgeon, etc.) and so on. On the other hand, looking at it from a health care professional’s point of view, the general receptionist at the main desk needs different access than the receptionist at the patient check-in desk than the receptionist at the patient check-out desk. And this is where the bad experience and misunderstandings even in a thing like role access could come in place.

Therefore, I believe that having a Healthcare Informatics Professional role in an implementation of an EMR system is critical as they understand both the worlds. And, not only would bad experiences or misunderstandings be cleared, but a transition or conversion would take place very smoothly as well as barriers like cost could be eliminated. Now, being enrolled into the program and getting real world experience I see the importance of a Healthcare Informatics Professional.