Outpatient Surgery Magazine, providing current information on Surgical Services, Surgical Facility Administration, Outpatient Surgery News and Trends, OR Excellence and more.
Issue link: http://outpatientsurgery.uberflip.com/i/771117
That surgeons will want to access your EMR from their offices. And that screens will freeze while you're in the middle of charting a case. But when we embarked on our EMR project nearly 3 years ago, I was in largely uncharted territory. I don't want you to go down the same dead ends and blind alleys as I did. Here, no punches pulled, is what awaits you as you make the move to EMRs. It's a big (and ongoing) investment. Our startup costs were more than $160,000: about $100,000 for software, $30,000 for servers, wireless systems and IT consultant fees, and $36,000 for hard- ware (20 15-inch laptops that cost $1,800 apiece). Then there are ongoing costs. We pay our vendor a $7,000 quarterly service charge for upgrades and 24/7 customer support (the help desk will undoubt- edly ask if you have the current hardware when you call to report an issue). Pay attention to the fine print. Will the support fees increase every year? Are upgrades included? Be sure to budget for IT projects associated with adding an EMR, such as building infrastructure, buy- ing add-on modules, cloud storage and cycling out computers every 4 years. Size matters when it comes to computers. We had a cou- ple false starts with our computer procurement. We didn't buy enough and the ones we did buy didn't have big-enough screens. False start No. 1 was thinking that our nurses could share computers. We didn't put a computer in each bay, but we soon realized that each nurse needs her own — just as a paper chart travels with the patient from pre-op to PACU, so, too, must the EMR. False start No. 2: The screens of the 4 tablets we initially bought weren't big enough to dis- play the full page, forcing you to scroll to get to the bottom of each page of the EMR. Very annoying. So we went with 15-inch Dell laptops 1 2 J a n u a r y 2 0 1 7 • O U T PA T I E N TS U R G E R Y. N E T • 8 5