Migrating to a new Electronic Health Record (EHR) is, for most hospital systems the single largest undertaking in the history of its health system and presents significant challenges to its operations, the clinical staff’s workflow, their process for documenting care and lastly keeping the health system’s revenue flowing. Migration requires careful planning and evaluation of processes. Like any major project it requires a close working relationship with multiple departments and clinical stake holders to drive the successful deployment and adoption of a new EHR and ultimately to realize the vision of one application for capturing and sharing patient information.
If you are migrating to a new EHR or are considering a migration, there are five myths that are not going to simply cause the migration to cost more and take longer than was budgeted – they will cause chaos throughout your organization. This white paper describes these myths, the chaos we have seen them cause and what can be done to prevent it. During the evaluation and planning stages of your migration you will be relying
on your new EHR vendor, internal resources, third party consultants, as well as interface and archive vendors to understand the options for migrating data and making data available from the legacy systems. You will be considering the value of that data for each specialty and department and what the impact would be to each of those groups if it was not available in the new EHR. In these discussions with vendors, remember that these are your hospital’s patients; it’s your data and your vision for the new EHR. Consider each group’s advice carefully since the consequences will impact every part of your organization at go-live and into the future as you shut down legacy systems and prepare for the future data requirements of the new EHR.
