The best medical practices should be as methodical as possible during the Electronic Medical Records (EMR) software selection process. From the start of the initial requirements gathering process throughout the selection process, some objective criteria should be used to measure an organization’s needs against how an EHR software solution meets these needs.

A scorecard or objective ranking system can serve as a guide to rank shortlisted Electronic Health Records (EHR) software and Practice Management (PM) software vendors based on the demonstration of their product. The process of ranking is effectively a continuation of the evaluation process conducted throughout the EMR software system selection.

How to rank EHR vendors based on their EMR Software demo

Throughout the EMR/PM selection process, members of the selection team must continue to rank cloud-based EMR vendors during the demonstration process. Ranking EMR/EHR vendors based on information gathered from their product demo would involve assigning a numerical value to each function or usability characteristic identified as important on a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 representing the lowest priority and 10 representing the highest priority.

The performance of the vendor would then be scored based on the ability to meet each of these functionality or usability characteristics on a scale of 1 to 5 with 1 representing poor performance and 5 representing excellent performance. Once these data are tallied, a practice can add data collected from the demo to determine the sustainability of the software.

The American Medical Association’s (AMA) Digital Health Implementation Playbook suggests evaluating EMR system vendors across six areas: Business, Information Technology (IT), Security, Usability, Customer Service, and Clinical Validation. Based on the scoring of these criteria, a selection team can prioritize which requirements are essential to an organization’s goals and which requirements can be viewed as discretionary.

Features to look for in an EHR demo

An EMR demo should be an opportunity to gather the information that can further the process of ranking and comparing products. Therefore, the main objective of a selection team should focus on involves guiding the vendor to provide as much useful information as possible. As such, at a minimum, the demonstration should allow the selection team to complete their scorecard, and not deviate from the path. However, one should recognize the reality that EHR vendors, rightly, will use the demonstration as a forum to promote the product. The vendor is demonstrating its product to convince, you, the consumer to adopt their EHR solution. However, selection teams can avoid keeping a vendor demo focused by clearly stating their needs from the start, which would prompt the vendor to pay particular attention to these areas.

All the EMR software companies offer demos including top EMR vendors like athenahealth, AdvancedMD, PrognoCIS, UroChart etc. EMR demos are a great source of information when completing the hunting process of EMR software system. This is because they offer selection teams the ability to rank vendors based on up close and hands-on information. However, selection teams must stay cautioned and they should take an active role in this finalizing process and not simply sit back and consume information selected by the EMR software vendor.