EHR Project -- Where Are We and What's Next?

The first phase of the Electonic Health Record implementation has been completed. That phase was the successful implementation of the Practice Management module of the NextGen system. My thanks to everyone that made this phase a success are well chronicled in previous posts so I will spare you any more of that.

I estimate that the EPM implementation made up about 20% of the overall project so that leaves us with 80% to go. Currently the EHR Core team, the Groovy Ninjas, are meeting weekly to discuss and plan for the different parts of the Electronic Medical Record portion of the project that comprises the next 80%. A brief summary of those items are listed below.

Hardware
A team made up of Hans Dethlefs, Kris McVea, Eloise Poyner, Beth Levy, and Kimberly Gibilisco each spent several days with each of the tablet pc's that we were testing. Jeremy Holt, our IT Coordinator, searched for the best available options for tablet pc's for our providers and nurses and approved four tablets for testing by the harware team. The models tested were from Fujitsu, HP, Lenovo (IBM), and Dell. Tablets were rated on a scale from 1 to 10 on factors like battery life, feel, screen, handwriting recognition, speed, wireless signal, and aesthetics. After all of the scores were in each member ranked the tablets overall. Both the objective scores and the provider votes for their favorite scored a conclusive win for the Fujitsu Lifebook T4220. Jeremy has ordered them and they are being stored in a secret location awaiting their configuration.

EHR Templates
The Electronic Health Record is really a giant powerful database with thousands of forms that display the data and allow for the entry of new data in to the database and reports that allow the users to print data from the database. The forms in NextGen are called templates. The NextGen EHR that we purchased comes already with thousands of these templates ready to use. The problem is that the templates that come with the system might not necessarily be set up to operate in the the same work flow that we have refined here at OneWorld through years or redesign. Hans Dethlefs has set about the task of collecting information from sources in the clinic about which forms need modified the most and how they should be set up to streamline the product. This is a huge task and is going well so far although there is a lot of work to do. Dr. Dethlefs is working with Tom Oakes from Personal PC Consultants on the programming side of this.

Other Items
The EHR core team is aslo developing plans for training, preloading data from existing charts, and interfacing with Creighton's lab system and the State of Nebraska's new immunization registry.


An Update on the Blog

Since the inception of the blog on 1/17/08, 359 unique visitors have logged on a total of 4,447 times and viewed 6,605 pages. The 359 visitors were from 13 different countries. Whoever can guess the most correct countries (*Hint-4 different continents) that visitors have come from will receive a $20 gas card. Email me your guesses by Friday. Visitors came from 65 different cities as well. Anyway, thanks for reading. If you are reading this and don't work for OneWorld maybe you should consider it. There is a link on the right side of the blog that shows current job openings. If you are gainfully employed and stumbled across it looking for EHR information don't hesitate to email us and we can share whatever information might be useful. There is also a link on the right where you can donate to OneWorld. We are a non-profit federally qualified community health center and every dollar you donate goes to helping people who would otherwise have little or no access to high quality health care.