Considerations Before Making the Leap to a New EHR System

Is there an end in sight to EHR (electronic health record) system switching for healthcare facilities?

The pure cost associated with EHR transitions across the healthcare industry over the past 10 years easily rivals the GDP of many developed countries. The acute care early adopters of the 1990s have likely moved on to their third or fourth EHR system at this point. Throughout the last few years, many ambulatory organizations have switched EHR systems as their practices evolve in size, become acquired, or join part of an integrated health system. With these major moves comes internal disruption for a healthcare organization’s providers, partners, staff, and patients.

Still, in addition to the above-mentioned market conditions, switching EHRs remains reasonably prevalent for a variety of reasons. For example, a recent KLAS Research study identified the biggest strengths and weaknesses of the top five ambulatory EHR vendor systems. Included within the weakness category were system downtime, stability, lack of training, and slow support responses. As such obstacles stack up, they may provoke consideration to switch systems. However, these weaknesses were largely mentioned within all five of the top ambulatory EHR systems, conveying that the grass is not always greener moving to another. So what can ambulatory care organizations do to overcome EHR utilization barriers?

Companies like Med Tech Solutions (MTS) exist to help providers and their healthcare facilities elicit the full value from their EHR systems. Focused on improving the provider experience, managed services offerings span hosting, IT outsourcing, cybersecurity, data archiving, disaster recovery, application stability (upgrades, patches), and service desk, as well as clinical workflow and revenue cycle optimization for provider facilities of all sizes. Through a combination of service level and uptime commitments, along with the predictability and accountability, many healthcare organizations find dependability in MTS offerings above what they may experience from their EHR vendors or current support firms.

By fully realizing the capabilities of their EHR system through partners like MTS, healthcare facility leaders also eliminate the time, cost, and frustration associated with needing to switch EHR systems. So, is there an end in sight to continued EHR switching across the market? Probably not, but it’s important to know that your organization has options before making that costly leap.

To learn more about generating the full value from your current EHR and IT systems through MTS Managed Services, click here.