This is a guest post from Joe Hage, CEO of medical device marketing consultancy Medical Marcom.
HIMMS fellow Michael Paquin advises how to set up an appropriate EMR selection meeting in this short video.
Michael Paquin: Okay, so one of the things as physicians decide to select a vendor for Electronic Medical Records that I always suggest to my clients is to select four to five EMR vendors and have them set up with what you would like to see during demonstration.
So let’s look at how this might affect your practice. If I were to call Vendor A, I would probably send two or three pieces of the papers you use mostly in your office. That could be an insurance form, that could be a doctor’s note, that could be something that you’re very familiar with maybe the top two pieces of paper in your office. I would send that to the vendor and I would say, “I’d like to see you for an appointment for a demonstration at my office and when you come I would like you to be able to show me how that paper becomes real in your Electronic Medical Record.”
All medical record companies say they can make a document electronically so I want to select a vendor that’s going to show the time and effort to show how something that is important in my practice is actually working in their Electronic Medical Record.
They all can do this for you. I’d give [the papers] to all five vendors and ask them to come and set up for their appointment.
Next, I set the location and the place for the presentation. It needs to be something such as an exam room where everybody can clearly see a monitor or a video screen and actually look at the product.
The next thing that we want to do is really set up the audience and by setting up the audience I think it’s highly important that you first look at the EMR the way the vendor would like to show it to you. Let me explain that.
What will happen quite often is you’ll get 4-5 doctors in the room or a doctor and 2-3 nurses and the vendor will start to show you the product and all of a sudden it will be, “Can you show me how it does this?” or, “Can you show me how it does that?”
What happens is the mind doesn’t see the workflow the way it would actually happen in office. You start to get confused because you have a vendor go quickly to this screen or quickly to this screen, I call it the “Puppy Dog Syndrome” and that’s where the vendor becomes the Puppy Dog and wags the tail trying to answer your question.
Save or write down all of your questions, let the vendor demo his product so you can see what the actual workflow is going to be in your practice. Take a look at that workflow and then take a small break and come back and ask the questions and then you’ll see how the vendor goes between the different templates, the different documents, the different things that they need to go through.
At that time also I would imagine you have half the questions taken off of your list and be able to see them in his first demonstration where he actually shows you the product. You’ll get a much nicer complete feeling of the product.
That’s all the tips for today and we thank you for your time.
Joe Hage: Thank you Michael.
See the first video interview with Michael Pacquin here.
Also from Medical Marcom: US Doctors on Twitter, a sortable and downloadable list.
