Independent Urgent Care and Family Practice Providers with No Occ Med

For start-up Urgent Care clinics that do not yet offer occ med services, Agility EHR can be implemented in approximately 30-45 days. This timetable assumes you have staff with expertise in your specialty, and have empowered them to make decisions to customize the software.  For example, your pricing, as well as allowable discount pricing, needs to be set up before you go live.  If you are a start-up, you will need to become approved with the payors in your geographic area, if you haven't already done so.  If you plan to submit claims electronically, you will need to work with the clearinghouse to get approvals from the payors, complete test submissions, and so on.  Integritas provides guidance and support, but many of the tasks can only be done by your staff, and they must have the time to do it.

Integritas will work closely with you on a defined project plan that we jointly manage.  We provide substantial online training to prepare your staff to use Agility EHR, and right before you are ready to go live, we send staff to your site to train your users.  We know most medical practice offices haven't undergone many EHR implementations, and we are prepared to guide you at every step.

Occupational Medicine Providers

Providers who have an existing clientele of employers to whom you offer occupational medicine and workers' comp services have a more challenging implementation. The process typically takes 60-90 days or more, depending on your size, and number of active employers. If you operate in a hospital environment and need to interface the software with other systems within the hospital, the availablity of IT support will substantially affect your implementation timeline.

The implementation project is managed by a team comprised of an Integritas Account Manager, an End User Project Manager and an IT Project Manager. These three people hold weekly scheduled teleconferences, and commit the resources within their respective organizations to prepare both the software and the organization for Go Live.

Some online training occurs with your staff prior to Go Live, so that they can make educated choices about how to set up the software to meet your organization's specific needs. EMR training for providers starts almost immediately after the project begins, so that they are well-practiced by Go Live. Like anything else, they will get better and faster the more they practice – and your reimbursement levels will show for it. The largest single part of the implementation involves getting employer contracts set up in the software so that the billing rules are correct from the start.

The necessary tasks are completed prior to our coming on site for end user training, so that when the user training is done, you will be ready to "go live" within a few days. We save the functions your users won't need right away for online training a few weeks later. This keeps the users from having to learn everything at once, which they appreciate.

Employee Health Departments

Hospital employee health departments in smaller organization have the least complicated implementation, largely because the services are so similar from one hospital to the next. Larger organizations simply take more time because of the number of people typically involved in the project, as well as the number of different services the Employee Health function offers.

In all cases, we start the project with a questionnaire, then set up many of the database tables for you based on the responses. We work closely with your IT department to assist them in extracting demographic data from your HR system, to populate the software with the organizational codes (job classes, departments, etc) and the employee demographic data needed to manage Employee Health. (Employee demographics are refreshed on a regular basis, at least every pay period.) Once the database is ready, we come onsite for a two-day training (or more, depending on the number of people to be trained), then spend a third day reviewing the database setup with the appropriate staff.

Those organizations that license Agility EHR for Employee Health will have the added tasks of setting up the electronic health record for the functions it provides: provider charting (edits), electronic prescribing, drug interaction verification, etc. We will begin provider charting training almost immediately, so that the providers develop familiarity and speed prior to Go Live.

Employer Onsite Clinics

EHR implementation for an employer onsite clinic that is not an extension of a larger provider organization, is a hybrid of the processes described above. Depending on the nature and scope of services to be offered, and the types of jobs in the organization (e.g., industrial or office), the task can be as straightforward as hospital employee health, or may require more time to set up medical surveillance rules for regulatory compliance, and train providers to use and edit the charting templates. Each individual situation requires an implementation plan tailored to your specific needs. Count on an experienced vendor to make the process clear and workable for you.

Work Flow Consulting

In addition to the standard implementation services, which focus on the proper tailoring of the software to meet your specific practice needs, Integritas also offers workflow consulting. User training will train your staff how to use the software. Who, specifically, is accountable to complete certain tasks, however, and when they do them, is a matter of workflow.  How the software integrates with your current procedures, and which of your current procedures are no longer needed once the software is installed, are matters of workflow.  If you have relied on a paper chart in a bin on the door to let you know where to go next, what will you do without paper charts?  These are examples of simple questions of workflow.

Integritas offers workflow consulting services through partner consulting associates. A consultant comes on site to work with your staff to understand existing workflows, and help develop new workflows that take into account the efficiencies you can realize with the software. Following the onsite visit, they provide an interim written report of recommendations, including suggested alterations to existing workflow. After review of this report in a follow-up conference call, the final recommendations are completed, based on feedback from you and your staff. Together with the consultant, you will develop policies and procedures for the staff, to ensure the software is properly integrated into operations.

Workflow analysis and consulting can save you months of sorting this out for yourself.  Don't take our word for it: ask someone you know who has implemented an electronic medical record and listen to what they tell you about it.  Ask them if they had any workflow consulting, and if not, whether they wish they had!