Top Legacy EMR Support Partner Evaluation Criteria

One of the crucial questions to ask when choosing a vendor, which vendor would be the best fit for providing legacy EMR support as they transition to a new EMR.

In this market segment, which is flooded with high-performing firms, those that consistently hit the deadlines, delivering quality resources at best helping managed service providers to succeed. The application support and maintenance solutions offered to the customer aid them with high value and quality resources and assistance beyond their original scope.

The legacy systems need to be replaced with the modernized ones due to their inability to provide adequate clinical support in the present healthcare environment. 

Underlying the Selection Assumptions of an EMR 

Some important clinical goals to underline can include the improvement in the satisfaction of the patients, improve the ease of clinical documentation and system used by clinicians, improve the cost accounting methodology with respect to clinical and non-clinical functions, and develop an effective mechanism to deliver healthcare to a geographically dispersed community.

Initiation of the EMR Selection Process

The process starts by first identifying the need for significant change in the health information management system. Joint leadership of the application support service provider and the clinical enterprise can aid in progressing with the project. 

During the inception of any project, strategic issues identification has two major benefits. One, the existing issues that require immediate fixing. Two, generating an initial implementation strategy consisting of pro forma project plans, which act as a baseline to evaluate vendor proposals throughout the selection process.

Preliminary Vendor Screening 

This helps healthcare service providers to quickly shortlist the vendors. The vendors to be shortlisted based on these key requirements -

Product employed current technology.

Product to be a fully integrated suite of core clinical components.

Applications are available for inpatient, ambulatory, and outreach environments.

Vendor demonstrating financial and management ability.

The vendor with the experience of large tertiary care and academic customers. 

Product Demonstration

The product demonstration can occur in three types -

Drive-By

A process where each vendor has to exhibit their product, its features in a way that sounds convincing and deliver promising results. This stage is the first and the last unstructured sales presentation for a vendor to fit within the criteria.

Controlled On-site 

A sales presentation that is meant to address the key components of the key issues in the RFP as well as focus on the key criteria. This clarifies the vendor viability, strategic technology planning, and conformance of functional requirements and objectives. 

Customer-site Visit 

Here comes the role of decision-makers, where informal discussion bridge the gap between theory and practice for actual software implementation and usage. The process tailored is controlled in order to evaluate the vendors on quantifiable data. 

Analytical Tools

The value of the analytical tools used during the evaluation and selection process varies to each person. Such as, some decision-makers focus on quantitative decision tools while others focus on qualitative vendor assessment summary.

Request for Proposal (RFP) 

Here, where vendors are asked to respond to a set of pre-defined questions which can be compared with other vendors.

Vendor Assessment Summary 

A working document for making decisions. As per the consistency across vendors and criteria, ranking is given on a scale of 1 to 7. Since a decision process is a subjective process, still the assessment is based on the compilation of data that compared three vendors. 

Functionality Analysis 

The analysis is based on the most important functional requirements. The critical criteria encompassed 77 items distributed into 5 broad categories. The requirements revolve around workflow, process, and outcomes functionality, as opposed to specific detail features, which allows feature variability. 

CPR Attributes and Subattributes Assessment

The analysis of the vendor's product ability is assessed based on the patient's record described by the organization. Further, the cross-reference of the fulfillment of the attributes to a specific product is evaluated comprehending and comparing the commitments of the vendor to that of the actual functionality. 

Technology Assessment

In order to evaluate the vendors and select them under EHR criteria, 16 technical areas are designed. The assessment is made through color where the green color circle depicts favorable assessment, the amber depicts neutral assessment, and the red square depicts unfavorable assessment. 

Cost of Ownership

The analysis is made through the total cost of ownership and the net present value cost analysis. The net present value provides a single point comparison across all the vendors for the total cost. Cost of ownership also combines the annual support requirements. Healthcare organization can estimate the initial cost by segregating into capital and operating costs. 

Paired Comparision Analysis 

It is one of the effective tools that benefit in structuring and comparing single vendor-to-vendor under specific criteria. However, the decision is made keeping all the pros and cons in mind of a vendor across criteria, time, and functionality. 

This tool eliminates the diffuse commentary and focuses on vendor and criterion. Here vendors are ranked based on each criterion set by the management, which is then weighted as per the rank of the criteria to come up with the final weighted score.  

Risk Analysis

The purpose of the risk analysis is to identify which of the vendors would be the least risky in the long term. By combining the minimum risk with satisfactory fulfillment of the criteria provides an assessment that resulted in a vendor recommendation.

To Conclude -

Learning about EMR support partner for application support and maintenance leads to many questions. The most important aspect to note is change management. Quantify commitments made by the vendor, make pro forma analysis, identify the least risky then give rank to recommend.

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