Three questions a physician asked me yesterday.
- How can I save money?
- What can I do to NOT slow down?
- Yellow Pages is now Dead. What should I do So that patients find me?
All of this was in the context of EMR. What caught my attention immediately was that he was not focusing on ‘features’ and ‘tech’ talk but on real issues related to running the business of medical practice. If you look at these questions again, it tells you one major thing. Focus!
FOCUS!
- Address the main Business issues and concerns first. Not just your business afflictions or ‘pain points’ but also your ‘Aspirations’. This includes all the questions the doctor asked me that may be applicable to your situation, and more.
- Only after You’ve written your questions and business concerns, then you start drilling down to level-2 questions such as -what technology?
- Level-2 questions would include – Web-based EMR? Cloud EMR? Client Server? Windows or Apple? Mobile?
- Finally, the features, user interface, accessibility, and so on.
As you start making a list of each of these four levels, make sure it Connects with the level above.
Unfortunately, most providers (and even vendors) start in the reverse order and try to ‘retrofit’. This is a recipe for disaster and failure. This is why by various estimates 70-80% of EMR implementations fail.
In another blog, hopefully, soon, I will try to list out sample questions for each of these 4 Focus levels.
