Beginning next week, licensed healthcare facilities in New Jersey need to begin using a new document that will help make hospital transfers easier on both patients and local medical professionals. By recording information on a one-page form, doctors in the state will now be able to give their colleagues basic information about the patient’s medical history, mental status and dietary needs when a transfer is needed, according to The Times of Trenton.
However, while this transition will help medical professionals communicate better in the short-term, by 2015 all doctors in the country need to be using electronic medical records to store this type of information. As a result, doctors and managers of small healthcare facilities may want to learn how to best take on this new compliance process once their transition to the new documents are complete.
These individuals can look to the experiences of Robert Murry, M.D., a family doctor in a rural part of New Jersey who is helping more than 180 local physicians navigate their transition to EMR software. In a recent interview with HealthcareIT News, he spoke at length about some of the challenges he has seen facilities face during these upgrade processes.
“Medical software – [healthcare IT] in general – everything has to be perfect, because, you know, people’s lives [are] on the line,” Murry told HealthcareIT News. “Everything has to change in general at the same time. That’s very challenging.”
Murry told the news source that his team strives to be flexible with its EMR and works to make the software function in terms of an office’s existing workflow. Doctors looking to make their EMR transition to software from providers like Medisoft may want to hire the services of a larger provider that is capable of offering these touches, as they could save money by working with a more established EMR provider.