Last Updated | July 9, 2024
Executive Summary – How to Build an Electronic Health Record System
EHR practice management software is evolving from a wish to a necessity as the world moves towards a digital transformation. We’ll discuss how to build an electronic health record system in ten easy steps in our article today. The software keeps records of patients, containing data on their medical history, prognosis, diagnosis, lab results, prescriptions, patient billing, and much more.
Overview: How to Build an Electronic Health Record System
There are numerous electronic health record (EHR) systems, but most of them suck.
No matter what the hype, if the EHR system is fundamentally built with poor functionality, it is unfixable.
There is no doubt that EHRs are incredibly powerful tools for healthcare practices. But when they fail to work, they disappoint practitioners.
Because of design flaws and time-consuming glitches in EHRs, about 54% of physicians are frustrated with this technology.
And, if you have had a similar experience, you are one of them.
Even if you count among this number, you never want to return to the paper-only era and the old days of using paper charts, right?
But, then, what’s the way out?
Well, the no-brainer answer to this is; EHR vendors need to improve their products.
To make this approach work and cut down the burnout EHRs cause, we at folio3, for many years, have been tackling the hiccups in EHRs so that you save the extra hours you spend on data entry.
Even if you do not have millions of dollars to invest in a new EHR software, folio3 can help you build something that makes physicians’ lives easy.
At folio3, we are constantly improving the design of electronic health record systems to create interactive interfaces, so your teams can have a flawless usability experience.
After years of experience, we are able to help you build electronic health record systems in ten easy steps, keeping you in the loop until your system is set up and fully functional.
3 Tips for Building a Successful EHR System
How to Build an Electronic Health Record System By Folio3?
Throughout the development process, we keep a continuous dialogue with your staff to ensure that everything meets your practice needs and set criteria.
To understand how you can build an EHR system with our help, let’s walk you through a detailed 10 step development process:
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How to Set a Clear Roadmap
It is completely normal for practices to be clueless about what to do before EHR development. The understanding of needs, goals, and expectations comes after you identify flaws in your current system or workflow.
Outlining tasks that suck most of your energy and time helps you build the system to tackle operational flaws that reduce efficiency.
That’s why the fundamental step to building an EHR is to sketch out goals associated with constructing an EHR system.
For defining goals, take a full assessment of your practice and consult with your staff to solicit feedback on which tasks are most daunting and sucking up physicians’ time.
In a recent study, 41.06% of practices reported that their driving force for implementing an EHR is to support growth. If that is one of your goals, too, you can plan to have an EHR to automate most of your practice tasks and drive efficiency with greater functionality.
However, your goals can differ.
A valuable piece of advice is that EHR implementations become botched when management fails to evaluate the need for implementing a new system. So, you must also involve high-level executives to learn about the current state of medical practices and what is most important to add to the system.
Once the key decision-makers vet the list of features, you must put everything in detail in the outline. This will be helpful for narrowing down what kind of functionality we must include in the system. Plus, you can also use the same list to assess the success of the system after go-live.
When the software is built based on your set goals, your staff will willingly embrace the new system after the development is over, as they will receive the exact product they need to have.
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Defining Budget Limits and Projections
Common downfalls in EHR implementation occur when healthcare organizations invest a massive amount of resources but get lackluster ROI.
Your aim with EHR should be: to lower costs for patients and improve the quality of healthcare services. For that, you need a well-defined budget for your EHR that does not cause you profit loss, either.
Besides your specified costs of building the system, the estimated cost you can expect to spend per user is around $1,200 per year. These extra costs, other than what you might expect initially, are associated with system implementation, maintenance, and the creation of security systems.
However, defining a budget clearly helps you mitigate the costs as much as possible. Therefore, our experts help you create a realistic budget that includes:
- Customization consultancy and consultancy costs
- Training fees
- System upgrades
- Cloud migration costs along with backup and storage
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Preparing the Infrastructure
Another critical step of EHR development is preparing the architecture.
If the basic infrastructure of the system does not simply accommodate good practices across the board and has a poor UX design for healthcare providers, there is a problem. This affects your practice efficiency and makes your patients screwed.
To ensure your EHR implementation goes successful, our teams build your EHR IT infrastructure with robust security protocols. Security is supported with strategies to quickly recover your system from disasters, guaranteeing high uptime and staff efficiency.
The architecture includes components such as interoperability, messaging standards, security, registries, safety, and privacy. To make sure your system security meets privacy laws, our experts build EHRs in compliance with HIPAA standards.
Beyond software, the infrastructure encompasses your hardware needs that we assess and enforce with new devices during this step of the whole process. Preparing hardware entails a printer installation in each physician’s room and supplying other staff members with appropriate technology tools.
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Transferring Data
Once we prepare the infrastructure for your system, we transfer your patient data from the legacy system to the newly built electronic health record system.
Analyzing the best approach for your practice and patients, we create a seamless data migration mechanism that reduces your staff’s frustration.
To make the transfer process as easy as possible, we take care of a few aspects such as:
- Define migration parameters: what data needs to enter EHR and how large the backup needs to be
- Create a workflow to make data entry as clear as it can be to avoid inaccuracies
- Arrange training for data entry staff
- Check and double-check to ensure all information is added correctly
- Unlike most vendors, we encourage you to store paper charts safely
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Conducting EHR Training Sessions
Changing old habits to new ones is never easy.
Your staff is used to working on paper charts. So, they might be reluctant to adopt new ways of handling patient records. A lack of motivation can actually exacerbate a feeling of reluctance to learn to use the new system.
To encourage their participation in learning, at this step, we focus on the training aspect of EHR implementation to get your staff to buy into the new system.
We also know how boring manuals and training sessions make employees less inclined to learn to use a new system. Therefore, experts at folio3 design engaging training programs that help your staff learn quickly and well- to meet your organization’s implementation goals.
Our EHR training is comprehensive, customized for each practice, and highlights the significant benefits of implementing EHR and how you can do it successfully.
The training is for everyone. From medical and dental assistants to patient service coordinators, medical office computer specialists, and medical records clerks- everyone can learn to use the EHR.
In this step, what we do for you covers:
- Providing a highly skilled team of trainers for on-site or remote training
- Selecting super users from your practice as the points of contact with our teams
- Setting clear training goals and a timeline to finish the training in time
- Modifying training to fit the current skill level of your staff
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Optimizing EHR Software For Mobile Phones
Making EHR mobile-friendly makes it easy for patients to access their health information. Patients who access their health records (especially if they want to do so) are known to have become proactive in managing their health.
While designing the system, we make sure to make it responsive to mobile phone screens, so patients deal with no barriers while trying to access the system.
Having worked with a number of clients in the healthcare industry, we are pretty familiar with what features and components attract patients. We also help you market your new implementation among patients and encourage your patients to make the most of new technology in your practice.
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Getting EHR System Certifications
A certified EHR is what saves you from legal allegations and transforms the way your practice runs.
We seek to comply with all certification requirements established by ONC (Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology) which is an HHS (Department of Health and Human Services) supported organization in the US.
The ONC certifies all healthcare IT that is standardized as per the technology capability, security, and functionality requirements adopted by HHS. Certified EHR systems go through pre-testing and post-certification requirements to ensure adherence to technical standards.
After taking into account certification requirements, we carry out our EHR product development and conform to certification criteria.
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Managing Standards and Protocols Compliance
In addition to being aware of the technical capabilities of EHRs, we also pay special attention to changing regulations that could hinder the full utilization of EHRs. In order for you to maximize the use of the EHR system, we keep you aware of essential information on regulations and meaningful use that may impact your new EHR.
Like any other technology dealing with PHI (protected health information), EHR software must comply with HIPAA law. Among other security needs, our EHR software strictly controls the privacy of patient data by restricting access based on user roles. For example, while sensitive patient data is only accessible to the provider and patient, billing and payment-related information can be maintained by administrative staff.
Our EHR software can also run automated logs to record every action on the system, which you can use for audit purposes.
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Get Ready for Go-Live
To avoid glitches in the system, it must be fully developed and tested before the launch. In some cases, testing goes hand in hand with development. We run tests on your new EHR in a production environment to comply with regulations.
Our developers add automatic tests into the code. Then, a QA (quality assurance) engineer goes through all possible scenarios and sees the system from all imaginable angles.
By this time, your staff becomes well-versed with the system’s functionality and how they can use it to its fullest potential. Still, if there are areas where the system lacks, we find and address them to tackle as many issues as possible before jumping to the actual launch day.
At some point, when the system meets set criteria and new content, features, or modules are in place, we launch it in your practice. You can inform patients about the new EHR software and enlighten them about the benefits they can reap from it.
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Post-Launch Reflection by Tracking the Performance of your Custom EHR Software
The EHR development process is not over with going live; the launch of your new EHR is just the beginning. The development process of your custom EHR software is ceaseless, iterative, and often needs ongoing training to keep your staff well-accustomed to changes in the system.
Post-launch reflection on your EHR involves fixing some lingering (minor) issues and keeping your system up-to-date. Of course, this step is far less intensive than initial development. Still, it is something that our teams consider critical and thus make sure to fix the bugs.
After we have launched the system, we get a deeper insight into areas, including:
- Patient satisfaction to reduce frustrations
- Productivity levels to keep staff motivated by setting reasonable expectations
- ROI by performing calculations and comparing progress against goal metrics
- Data errors to determine where additional training is required.
- Billing, reporting, and data collection to make adjustments (if and as needed) and improve operations
Rundown About How to Build an Electronic Health Record System
We believe practices choose companies, or rather teams, not technologies when opting for an EHR development partner. With that in mind, we line up highly specialized tech people who are curious to understand your needs and offer customized approaches to solve your problems.
Our experience with building certified EHR for practices across the border gives us the ability to make the development process very effective. So, you can focus on finding solutions and discovering workarounds to avoid delays in your physician’s workflow and prevent negative effects on patient care.
Developers at our company have intricate knowledge of what medical professionals deal with. This helps us figure out the best ways to help you achieve the best results without burnout.
So, using the system becomes a joy, not a frustration.
FAQs – How to Build an Electronic Health Record System:
What are the CMS requirements for EHR?
CMS (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services) requires eligible providers and hospitals to adopt meaningful use of a certified EHR. To successfully participate in the CMS interoperability promotion programs, there are reporting requirements they need to meet. Some of the CMS requirements are as follows:
- Currently, CMS does not oblige providers to store all their clinical data in certified EHR. However, it requires providers to report clinical data quality measures exactly how EHR generates the results to demonstrate meaningful use.
- The reporting period for eligible providers and hospitals is a minimum of a continuous 90-day period in 2023.
- Within the time period, they must report on any six electronic clinical quality measures (eCQMs) relevant to their practice scope.
- To ensure meaningful use and avoid incurring a downward payment adjustment, eligible hospitals and providers are allowed to use the current 2015 certification criteria edition.
- The CMS requirements make it mandatory for EHR functionality to be in place on the first day of the 90-day period and certified by the last day of the period.
What are the best EHR technology platforms in 2024?
Here’s a list of the best electronic health record (EHR) platforms in 2024:
DrChrono
From medical records to practice management to billing systems, DrChrono EHR software handles all. It prioritizes reasonable efforts to be fully compliant with all HIPAA requirements.
Epic
Epic EHR software is aimed at helping people get well, stay well, and live healthier lives in the future. It is a cloud-based software with the functionality to handle the daily operations of hospitals, including their EHRs.
Carecloud
Carecloud provides an integrated electronic health record platform known as Charts that offers collective benefits of EHR, medical billing service, and practice management software.
Kareo
Kareo is an integrated technology platform, the electronic medical record solution for outpatient settings used by practitioners across the US. It is qualified to help eligible practitioners obtain meaningful use attestation.
Cerner
Cerner EHR platform called Millennium® supports an integrated view of patient care in outpatient and inpatient settings. It helps providers make data-driven decisions to provide greater care.
Allscripts
Allscripts EHR software is developed by one of the top healthcare software companies in the USA. It is a clinical and operational solution for small and mid-sized practitioners to help them run operations well and improve revenue cycle management.
How to implement a patient portal?
You can implement a patient portal technology in your practice by following the steps outlined below:
- Research and learn about different patient portal technologies and vendors
- Based on your goals, look for the features and benefits that are most important for your practice
- Keep all stakeholders on the same page and get their approval before communicating to vendors
- Evaluate existing workflows and make adjustments
- Select a partner for consultation and onboarding support
- Get a custom portal built by the vendor or choose a pre-made one
- Prepare your portal for go-live
How to create EMR software?
Whether you are interested in creating EHR software for other organizations or yourself, there is a seven-step process that can help you do it.
Step 1. Do thorough research and planning and understand your project scope
Step 2. Determine tech stack for development, estimate EHR development cost, and create an architecture for the system
Step 3. Prototype and design the system
Step 4. Develop the features as per specifications
Step 5. Train the users and test the system
Step 6. Launch the system and identify which areas need final changes
Step 7: Make necessary modifications
What is a laboratory data management system in healthcare?
A laboratory data management system is software used for importing, organizing, and storing laboratory test results. The system is used for reporting on sample data and test results. Some hospitals and practices (with the help of top medical device integration companies) integrate their EHRs with laboratory management systems to automate the process of data exchange. LIMS can keep the EHRs updated with the latest data on patients in real-time.
Name two top medical device integration companies in the EHR market?
In the EHR market, two top software companies are Cerner and Epic. They offer integration solutions for organizations to connect their EHRs with medical devices.
Cerner integration
Cerner’s electronic health record system establishes a seamless connection between people and information across the board. The company also offers Cerner HL7 integration to connect healthcare devices, EHRs, and other medical technologies for sharing information.
Epic integration
Epic integration creates a hybrid solution by integrating paper chart records with electronic health records. It also connects EHR with patient portals to improve communication between providers and patients.
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