With patient care being intertwined, EMR technology is indispensable at many facilities. Unexpected downtime is rare, but when the EMR does go down, processes must be in place that enable staff to quickly access an alternative. What happens next is as important as what happened moments before, including a potential transition to manual documentation.

John Lynn, of Hospital EMR & EHR, has a great analogy:

“When I think about EHR downtime I’m reminded of the Titanic. You can invest all you want in the “unsinkable” EHR implementation and unexpected downtime will still occur. Yes, much like the Titanic that everyone thought was totally unsinkable, it now lies at the bottom of the ocean as a testament to nature’s ability to sink anything. That includes causing your EHR to go down.”

This presentation will cover approaches to EMR business continuity including definition and documentation of workflows both within and between systems, and workflows in a downtime situation. We’ll discuss business continuity solutions and what your emergency procedure should look like. Join us as we survey industry business continuity approaches and present best practices.

Missed the webcast? We’ve got you covered!

We’re sharing a recording of the webcast, along with the slides use. Perpetually Learn & Share, it’s one of our 5 Main Things. And be sure to check out our roster of future web webcasts here.

Webcast Recording

Slides

Q&A

Q: Are there apps specific to electronic documentation that can be installed on work stations for documenting during downtime that can upload data into the EMR when service is restored? If so, do you have any suggestions?

A: We spoke to Galen’s product, VitalCenter, but at the moment it is specific to TouchWorks. I am not very familiar with what is out there on the market. After doing some research we weren’t able to find anything definitive. I think the concern would be how to import that data back in while maintaining versioning, as we can appreciate with notes, there’s a lot of metadata and audit data around that especially when you consider different versions of it and you have to maintain that integrity. So to answer the question directly, there may be other vendor specific solutions, like VitalCenter out there, but there wasn’t any generic solution that we were able to unearth anything with regards to an app specific to electronic documentation.

Interested in learning more?  Check out our Business Continuity Solution or Contact us below: