On August 31, the Sauk Prairie Optimist guest speaker was Rich Bonjour of Sauk Prairie Healthcare, who explained EHR, or Electronic Health Records. Sauk Prairie Healthcare recently studied EHR companies and selected a finalist for a new EHR system.
EHRs track all data on patients such as registration, schedules and discharges, documents, labs, orders—basically all patient information. Other parts of EHRs include billing, medical coding, general ledger and more.
When the process of HER selection began, Sauk Prairie Healthcare was currently using three EHRs which didn’t work well together, were disjointed, and old.
Challenges to selection were a minimum of a 10-year commitment, how the change could affect staff, the (sometimes strong) opinions of staff, a lot of misinformation, and expense, where a mistake in selection could be very costly.
The three main players in the selection were Meditech, Cerner, and Epic. The EHR Vendor Evaluation Project by Sauk Prairie Healthcare had 45-50 participants and 10-15 providers.
Meditech was the EHR company selected to be the new EHR. Epic was ruled out based on several opinions, like small hospitals losing the ability to focus on things that are most important to them, and small hospitals face the threat of take-over as Epic works primarily with large hospitals who have little incentive to take on smaller hospitals.
How will the new EHR improve patient care? There will be a single EHR throughout the Sauk Prairie Healthcare organization, a better communication ability with care partners, the ease of adding new services, evidence-based decision making, increased user satisfaction, and enhance Patient Portal functionality,
The new system will go live on November 1, 2022.
Rich Bonjour of Sauk Prairie Healthcare, left, and Bart Mauch, SP Optimist President, right, after Bonjour’s presentation to the Club at their noon meeting August 31 at Jaybird Cafe’ and Spirits.
