How To Buy An EMRFrom http://www.emr-matrix.org

Selecting the right EMR

Five Key Factors For Selecting An EMR Today:

1. Price: There are a lot of free EMR’s out there now, price IS a factor

2. User Experience: What is the use of an EMR if you can’t use it effectively?

3. Workflow: Part of the user experience as well. Does this actually help you focus more on patient care?

4. Patient Engagement: Does the EMR have a consumer portal that is user friendly, allows users to interact with clinicians (in a controlled fashion) and decreases your administrative burden?

5. Interoperability: Does it play nicely with your other practice management and clinical systems

What About Free?

As mentioned, free or freemium is all the rage now and you get to win from that. Now there is truly “free” and there is “freemium”. What's the difference?I. Free (although nothing is really free) typically refers to opensource systems like OpenEMR which you can install on a server or hosting enviroment for $7 a month and it’s yours…period.

II. Freemium is more like the Practice Fusion model where the will give you a free EMR but really they control it an monetize it with ads or sell the data. That the Freemium concept. You pay if you don’t want the ads or data sell.

Top Free EMR’s

We have evaluated the opensource or truly free EMR’s out there and found that the top two worth considering are:

I. OpenEMR: We have an example you can play with on our website. OpenEMR is MU certified and a growing movement in the industry. I would select this one myself if I were choosing an EMR.

II. OpenVista: One spawned off of work with the government. Pretty good but no OpenEMR.

OpenEMROpenEMR is opensource which means you get the code, have developers install it on a hosted environment and its all yours with no re-occurring costs.I have done this myself and calculated the costs below:

Item Monthly Cost Annual CostHosting for OpenEMR $7.95 (Omnis Hosting) $95.00

Code Customization and Install

$500.00 $500

Maintenance $2,000-3,000 (mi-squared) 2,000-3,000

Total $3,595.40

Advantages

So what makes OpenEMR concept so powerful? Well, I believe you should own your own destiny when it comes to EMR installs and more importantly interoperability.

Yes, other systems that are free talk about interoperability but do they really do that for free? No. It is a revenue center for most EMR’s, even free ones.

User Experience

The next factor is user experience. This is a subjective factor and one you really need to judge for yourself.

We have created a video page to review the different user experiences on the market. Take a look:http://emr-matrix.org/emr-apis/

Workflow

The next factor is workflow. Does the EMR system you are looking at support your standard workflows.

The best way to identify this is to go through your own practice and perform a workflow analysis then prioritize your different workflows based upon time spent per task. The goals is to be “job” focused or what “job” are you hoping to complete from this task.

Patient Engagement

The next factor is Patient Engagement. Patient Engagement is now a critical factor when selecting an EMR not only because it makes sense in 2012 but because it is part of the government ARRA funding for Meaningful Use.

Some critical patient engagement features include:• A patient portal• Secure messaging• Bi-directional data support• Mobile application for consumers

InteroperabilityThe last factor we will discuss here is interoperability. This is super critical not just for an initial implementation (how much it will cost to implement) but for scalability of your system over time.

For example, you implement an EMR now and two years from now you want to implement a new clinical system. If you select an EMR that does not have a Service Oriented Architecture, RESTful services and oAuth for authentication, you maybe in for a massive custom integration bill.

If you want to see some of the best EMR’s, we do rank them on interoperability at: www.emr-matrix.org

Bottom-LineBottom-line is, selecting an EMR system takes thoughtful research and understanding what is out there.

Know thyself has never been more true as you must know your own “use cases” and workflow requirements before selecting an EMR so that the workflow built into that system matches your needs.

Also, try before you buy. Test out an EMR and have your team test it out to make sure it truly is user friendly. If people don’t buy in to it, then its use will be limited.

Lastly, remember Opensource is a great option and we have lots of resources if that is an approach that works for you.