EHR stands for Electronic Health Record. An EHR is a computer program designed to taker the place of a patients paper chart. The idea is that anywhere where there is a computer connected to the network you can pull up a patient's chart instantly. The reasons to implement an EHR are to improve quality of care for the patients, increase patient safety, increase efficiency, and reduce redundant work.
18 months ago Andrea convened a committee consisting of Dr. McVea, Dr. D., Andrea, and myself. Our task was to search for and evaluate all options for an EHR system. We sent requests to as many EHR companies as we could find. Dr. D sat through a demo with each of the companies that responded and then if he thought a company's program was good then he had Dr. McVea and I look at the demo too. The list was narrowed during this process of demos and also gathering info about the products from others in our industry. Ultimately we narrowed the list to two, NextGen and GE Centricity and visited health centers who were already using them so that we could see them in action.
NextGen was our favorite so we had them come to OW in September (as I remember it) and do demos for the entire staff. Staff response was extremely positive regarding the product and we decided that NextGen was our first choice. We began negotiations and finally reached an agreement on price and terms with NextGen just days before the end of the year.
This is a really long post. I will try to keep them shorter in the future. Now you know the background on how we came to decide that NextGen would be our product of choice for our EHR system.
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