Do you know that almost 64% of US hospitals share patient data with external providers electronically?
The widespread adoption has improved efficiency and effectiveness in care delivery but has also given rise to a new set of challenges and problems. These problems consist of clerical and additional data-entry burdens on healthcare providers.
This has been one of the major reasons why many healthcare providers are today shifting towards custom EHR software development. But despite this shift to custom healthcare IT solutions from off-the-shelf software solutions, the satisfaction rate of healthcare providers has hardly changed.
Recognizing the trends and patterns in the healthcare landscape and providing healthcare software consulting to many prominent healthcare institutions, we observed that the problems usually lie in the discovery phase while you build your own EHR.
Being the very first step of healthcare software engineering, the whole idea and curation of EHR software depends on this. And many healthcare providers, being fairly new to the digital health transformation, fail to turn their ideas into a reality.
On that note, let this blog be your guide to the discovery phase for your custom EHR software development. In this blog, let’s explore different facets of personalized EHR solutions and how the discovery phase can set the bedrock for the development of ideal Electronic Health Records software.
So, without further ado, let’s get started!
Step 1: Defining Project Goals & Objectives
In the very first step of the discovery phase, you basically articulate the desired outcomes of the EHR software. Being the EHR software, it should help your practice effectively manage patient health data, sharing and aligning it with the clinical and non-clinical workflow of your practice.
Based on this, the specific features and functionality of the software are determined. This is where you have to identify the specific pain points that lie in your system. To name a few, here are some of the things that you must consider if not implemented:
1. Interoperability: Your EHR system should have the ability to seamlessly integrate with other healthcare systems such as labs, pharmacies, etc., to reduce error and smooth information sharing.
2. Usability: The software should be user-friendly with interactive and intuitive interfaces. This will improve efficiency and reduce the margin of error.
3. Data Entry Efficiency: The EHR software should automate data entry practices to reduce the time spent on documentation.
4. Scalability: It is natural that with time your practice will grow, with respect to that, your EHR should be capable of handling the load and adapt to the changing nature of the practice.
5. Security and Privacy: Since the EHR software will be dealing with sensitive data, it should adhere strictly to the security and privacy standards to protect patient data from unauthorized access and breaches.
While you are at this, you should also establish some key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of the software. The key performance indicators must be time saved on delivery care and documentation, effective patient engagement, etc.
At this stage you must involve the key stakeholders for setting achievable goals. Apart from that, they will also help you in deciding the full scope of the software, according to which you can build an ideal EHR software for your practice.
Step 2: Understanding the Target Audience
While you are preparing for the digital health transformation of your practice with personalized EHR solutions, it is crucial for you to understand your core user group aka target audience. Understand that the aim here is to bring ease in healthcare delivery and effective sharing of healthcare information.
Furthermore, it will be your doctors, nurses, administrative staff and other healthcare professionals who will be using the software. So medical software development should be focused on them, and make their lives easier.
Here you need to analyze the specific needs of each user group and finalize the workflow of your practice. In this way, you will not only be able to identify the core pain points of your users but also curate a workflow that suits your practice and takes up a holistic way to care delivery.
One of the best ways to understand your target audience is to conduct user interviews and surveys and create user personas to represent different types of users. This is crucial for determining features of the software.
Having said that, the major advantage of creating user personas is to make informed design decisions and designing a user friendly UI/UX design in the future processes of your EHR software development.
Step 3: Assessing Existing Systems & Data
Data migration and ensuring completeness of the data are some of the major aspects of healthcare software engineering, especially in EMR software development. For this you have to evaluate the current EHR system you are using.
During the evaluation what you need to check is its limitations, identify the data sources and its unique formats. Once that is done, with the help of your healthcare IT vendor, you can easily assess the quality of the data and its completeness.
However, the work doesn’t end here. After it is done, you need to curate a... Click here to learn more