Many physician practices are changing EMR systems. Doctors feel pressured by government regulations, peer groups, and incentive programs from Medicare and Medicaid to implement some kind of EMR system for their practice. So they’ve given in. They are making a business decision and implementing a new system.
Months or years down the road, those doctors may realize they picked the wrong EMR package for all the right reasons. The package they selected may be perceived as more expensive, slower to implement, less intuitive, collecting less revenue, getting in the way of patient interactions, and slowing down the office. Physician practices across the country often implement something which sounds wonderful when the salesperson talks about it, but achieves results which aren’t meeting the physician’s needs.
Luckily, many of those same physicians decide to select something different and improve their processes. They choose to watch for all of the issues they have with the first package when they select a new information technology package. They know the new product they purchase must be better this time around to meet the demands of the practice. The golden solution for their practice is out there. The new solution must meet regulatory requirements, be easy to use, be quickly customized, and is low maintenance so physicians can refocus their efforts on their practice.
So the physician practice has implemented a new EMR system to fix the problem. In almost every case, the data questions start:
“But what do I do about all of the patient information that is still in the old system?”
“How do I get it out of there, and into the new system that I select?”
“The vendor for the old system makes it sound like they own all of that data, especially if I’m using an online EMR system, that can’t be right . . . can it?”
“They want HOW much money to give me a copy of MY data?!”
Everything will be fine- trust us. There are solutions to this problem and often those solutions come from someone other than a software vendor.
Finding Your Solution
The vendor who sold you your old system has a vested interest in making it sound as difficult as possible to extract your data in the hope that you will give up trying to switch to a new platform and stay on their system. It’s an unfortunate practice, but we see this type of behavior time and time again.
The vendor of your new system has a vested interest in making it sound as easy as possible to move the information out of the old system and into the new solution that they are trying to sell you . In most cases, integration and data gathering somehow doesn’t seem to happen like as they promised.
Both of those pieces of information are colored by the perspective of the group giving you the information. As such, the truth is more likely somewhere in the middle and it’s up to your to figure out how to navigate both sides of the negotiation.
Here at Art2link we have extensive experience creating interfaces that the vendors involved will claim can’t be created. When they tell you it can’t be done, it will cost a fortune, it will take two years to complete, you know it’s time to get a second opinion. It doesn’t matter what systems you are leaving or what systems you are moving to. We have the experience to handle Athena, Allscripts, Epic, eClinicalworks, Practice Fusion, McKesson, GE, Cerner, and almost any other system your practice is dealing with.
Download our whitepaper “EMR Data Interfaces and Extracts” for a discussion of techniques and approaches to solving this problem in your practice or contact us for immediate assistance.
It’s your data, don’t let anyone keep you from it. Trust us to show you how.