Insights on Transitioning from Paper to the EMR

by Tammy Flick, HIMSS Iowa Board member and HITREC Advisor

As a member of the Iowa HIMSS Board, I am able to surround myself with many others who work in the same field as I do.

Each of us has our own specialty and experience, but when we come together, it creates a wealth of knowledge and a synergistic team that wants to help its members. We have found our membership is growing and we are reaching greater audiences with our meetings and services.

I also am part of the Health Information Technology Regional Extension Center for Iowa and have found my HIMSS membership to be a valuable asset to learning about meaningful use and the latest news in the industry.

As we look into the future of the needs for health information technology, there are many areas that we will need to focus on.

Vendors, hospitals, clinics and consulting firms will now need to hire staff that understand both IT and healthcare.
Growing competent and qualified professionals is imperative to the success of HIT.

I encourage HIMSS members to explore the new programs that are being launched to create this workforce and look into becoming an instructor for these programs. As we know, real-life experience is the best teacher, and the best teachers do have real-life experience. Use your knowledge to teach others how to be successful in this field and an asset to the HIT workforce.

I had a clinical background as an ICCU and Emergency Department R.N. before transitioning to the informatics and EHR portion of my career. I can relate to the difficulty clinical staff experience when changing processes and converting from paper charting to and EMR.

One of my first big projects was taking an emergency department that was 100% paper to a full EMR, including CPOE. A tremendous asset we found helpful was a test server, set up as it would be in a live environment. Staff used this server on their own time before going live with the EMR. We had the staff perform “parallel charting,” where they would take actual paper charts from their patients and enter them into the test system as they would after “go-live.”

This gave them the luxury of being able to get to know the new system without having an emergency situation going on at the same time. They developed a comfort level with the system and were able to navigate much more easily after go-live by drawing from the familiarity they gained with the parallel charting.

This, along with dedicated staff to make changes on the fly, enhanced the level of satisfaction staff felt during the transition. About a year after implementation, the system was down for a few hours to upgrade to a newer version. I knew the implementation was a success when a seasoned staff nurse came to me and said, “DO NOT EVER take my computer chart away from me again! Geez! I don’t know how we used to do all of this on paper! It takes forever!”