Support

When deploying and supporting electronic health records, it is essential to ensure a sound staffing infrastructure in addition to a technical one. With reliance on technology for access to a patient’s allergies, medications, problems, labs and other critical healthcare information, an organization has to have the human capital necessary to implement the system, modify its design as new data collection requirements present themselves, support the end-users, create reports, respond to technical issues and proactively monitor all systems. The recruitment and quality of human capital is paramount to the adoption and success of an electronic health record initiative and staffing depth is required to minimize risk.

Today’s market brings with it many challenges for healthcare information technology recruiting. With the promotion of EHR adoption by politicians and healthcare advocates at all levels, the demand for the technology is on the rise. The problem is that the labor pool of talented individuals to implement, configure, train or support these technologies is not keeping pace, thereby, driving up the salaries for persons with combined clinical and systems skill sets. Add to this the existing challenges for health centers with shoestring budgets or located in rural communities, and the challenge is highly elevated.

Implementing electronic health records, for any size organization, requires a variety of skill sets that cannot be adequately acquired within just one or two individuals. Such an organization would require the hiring of multiple individuals or the need to outsource, at a significant price, to fill the skill set gap. Staffing models to implement, deploy and support EHR requires personnel to monitor, manage and upgrade systems as needed while being readily available to respond to urgent technical issues during all business hours. They also require personnel that have programming and report writing aptitude with a keen understanding of the clinical data and how it is captured and utilized to ensure proper input and output mechanisms. Additionally, staff must be able to:

• Understand data mapping and data warehousing concepts in action to facilitate inter-systems data sharing environments.
• Develop forms tools used to collect and trigger data within the EHR. Skill sets required include some programming or SQL functional logic. Also, an understanding of clinical data is required.
• Develop custom report needs based on local, state, HRSA, payer, or other collaborative data analysis needs.

The organization implementing EHR must have the ability to purchase depth of staffing with appropriate skill sets; this is one synergistic result of multiple organizations collaborating as one with centralized services under the management of CHCA.