Implementing health information technology is a challenging effort that involves people from multiple disciplines and professional fields. However, through our decade long experience in implementing health IT solutions in care delivery organizations of various sizes, CureMD has defined a set of best practices that ensure successful the implementations while significantly reducing stress and cost.
- Involve clinicians, administrators, IT consultants, managers and office staff from the beginning of the project.
- Clearly define your requirements and functional needs (project scope). Lack of well defined requirements can result in significant delays and monetary overheads.
- Analyze your approach and implementation strategy every step of the way.
- Consult with a professional. Health IT specialists can help you make the right decisions if you are trying to achieve a balance between functionalities and costs.
- Identify usability, functionality and interoperability issues during implementation and make any necessary changes to resolve them.
- Start small. For large implementations, pilot projects can help to minimize the chance of issues repeating across various departments or locations.
- Listen to your end users and carefully evaluate and respond to their feedback. Actively solicit feedback so you can implement improvements before problems arise.
- Train, evaluate and support your users throughout the implementation process. This is essential for optimizing user efficiency, effectiveness and system adoptability.
- Medical knowledge and technology will continue to evolve, so implement your system with scalability and expandability in mind.
- Test your system thoroughly before and after go-live, and resolve any issues, problems or bugs as quickly as possible. Slow resolution may demoralize users and result in low adoption.
- Transparency, reliability, usability and simplicity are important characteristics. Clinicians will not be inclined to use overly complex or slow software.
- End users determine the success of your implementation. Support them from the beginning of implementation and throughout training and post-implementation support.
- Realize that implementing health IT is not the ultimate goal. The objective should be to maximize the efficiency, quality and effectiveness of your care delivery processes.
- Support the implementation through proactive organizational policy. Facilitating user adoption through training and continued support can help you achieve optimum results.
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