What’s the Status of Your EHR Marriage?

It’s the beginning of 2022 and a good time to evaluate the relationship your company has with its electronic health record or EHR.  Is it a success in terms of what it delivers? When behavioral health or child welfare agencies engage an EHR to provide services for them, it is in truth a marriage, for these reasons:

Compatibility. For the EHR company and you the customer, the reason your company signed a contract with them is that you shared common needs and resources. The EHR can offer electronic record-keeping, together with forms and templates, to standardize your staff’s documentation at a basic level. But is it offering what your company wanted, in terms of treatment planning, outcomes, reports, billing, scheduling, data sharing, and other needs? 

Longevity. EHR’s are very time-consuming projects, with implementation, training, and ongoing issues. Once it’s put into place, it’s hard to change course. Data is stored, relationships are built between the EHR company and your company, and staff is used to a specific way of documenting in their system. Breaking it up and going separate ways is tantamount to a divorce, which can be messy and full of problems. 

Unrealistic expectations. Like with marriage, what appears in the beginning to be the pros of a relationship between the EHR and your company doesn’t always work out as planned. Sybrid MD recently came out with an article on many of the problems that exist between the EHR company and the customer. Most of these are because both partners look at the best-case scenario yet succumb to the worst case. In a recent blog we posted, we discussed the results of a National Behavioral Health EHR Survey, as well as presenting how EHR’s at times may not do a good job of listening to their customers. 

If you want the marriage of your company and your EHR to be successful long-term, you have to decide what is important to you. There may be times when the EHR cannot provide you with the data or tools you need. Does your EHR allow other vendors to integrate within their system? Do they use Applied Programming Interface or API to coordinate with other systems? 

No EHR can be the “one-size-fits-all” vendor, and sometimes they need help to work with your company. This does not mean the marriage fails, but that sometimes other parts will help to make it work. That is something you and the EHR company need to communicate about, something that all good marriages have. 

Praxes offers behavioral health software solutions that are compatible with EHR’s. For more information, please contact us.