1. Customized fits
What works for the acute care hospital around the corner or the sur-
gery center in the neighboring town likely won't fit the unique needs
of your facility. Thankfully, the latest EMRs are customizable before
the launch date and easily modified once they're up and running.
Shirley Torwirt, MHS, CASC, spent a lot of time looking for a system
that would meet the needs of North Platte (Neb.) Surgery Center,
where she's the administrator. Ms. Torwirt and her staff compared and
investigated different models in search of a single platform that could
handle the business office's practice management needs, accommo-
date anesthesia's clinical charting and document clinical data for cut-
ting through the red tape of regulatory compliance and reporting. The
product she ultimately chose met all those needs and could be adapt-
ed to match the way her staff charted in pre-op and the clinical care
orders they were already using.
Being able to tailor an EMR to your facility's specific needs makes
the system user-friendly and lets your staff focus on patients instead
of paperwork. "What you hear a lot about implementing an EMR is
that it's more time-consuming than paper charting and that it distracts
from patient care," says Ms. Torwirt. "If you implement one the way
we did, that's actually not the case."
2. Changes on the fly
When staff at Emerald Coast Surgery Center in Fort Walton Beach,
Fla., started down the paperless trail, they focused on finding a sys-
tem with a format that would match its recent efforts to reorganize
and standardize its documentation process. The center's staff and sur-
geons had worked to streamline its paperwork — from pre-op orders
to discharge instructions — so that all the required information could
fit on a single page. Their ultimate goal was to build an EMR system
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