A Good Data Conversion Will Eliminate the Need to Pay the Old Vendor for Support
A good data conversion will make life easier for everyone associated with your clinic, including your patients.
When you electronically migrate data from an old system into your new one several good things occur.
Doing data entry manually is more expensive and error prone.
The most reliable check for accuracy is the patient and that can prove embarrassing and unnecessarily consume more time.
The same is true for clinic data such as chart notes, medications, problem list, immunizations, lab results and the notes associated with each.
However, the patient is not a reliable source to check for accuracy of this data.
The old record, in whatever way you can access it's content, is the only way to validate data accuracy.
When the data from your legacy system has been moved to your new system there is no longer a need to have support for the old system.
In terms of direct financial benefit, this has the highest and most immediate ROI against the cost of the conversion.
Your staff is busy enough without asking them to look at the old system for some patient information.
It can get confusing and it will lead to errors and omissions.
Data integrity between two unconnected databases disintegrates rather quickly, leading to further errors.
The transition to a new EHR system takes longer than anyone wants it to.
Elongating the process by stringing out the data migration via manual data entry seems less than prudent.
Every EHR vendor has sample data for use in training.
However, most of them will allow the use clinic data from a test conversion run for the training.
This serves a dual purpose.
The training is far more meaningful.
This is an excellent validation for the test conversion.
No one likes to hold their clinic's collective breath and manually track patient information while waiting for a data migration to be completed.
On the other hand, you can utilize multiple test runs to validate the conversion while active use of the old system continues.
When the final data conversion is run the down time is a few days, not several weeks.
Finally, if one data type, say immunizations, cannot be accurately converted it can be dropped from the conversion while retaining the other data that can be satisfactorily converted.
In summary, a good data conversion is well worth the effort and the cost.
The final analysis will show:
When you electronically migrate data from an old system into your new one several good things occur.
- Manual effort to load data into the new system is correspondingly reduced.
- Support payments to the vendor of your legacy system can be stopped.
- Your staff will not need to look in two places for information on patients.
- Patients will not be required to give you insurance and other information they think you already have.
(And you do.
) - The stress of transitioning to a new EHR is over sooner.
- Training on the new system can be done with your data.
- Multiple test runs can be provided to insure the highest quality and quantity of data transfer.
- If part of the data migration can not be made satisfactory, it can be bypassed while the remainder of the data can be moved to the new system.
Doing data entry manually is more expensive and error prone.
The most reliable check for accuracy is the patient and that can prove embarrassing and unnecessarily consume more time.
The same is true for clinic data such as chart notes, medications, problem list, immunizations, lab results and the notes associated with each.
However, the patient is not a reliable source to check for accuracy of this data.
The old record, in whatever way you can access it's content, is the only way to validate data accuracy.
When the data from your legacy system has been moved to your new system there is no longer a need to have support for the old system.
In terms of direct financial benefit, this has the highest and most immediate ROI against the cost of the conversion.
Your staff is busy enough without asking them to look at the old system for some patient information.
It can get confusing and it will lead to errors and omissions.
Data integrity between two unconnected databases disintegrates rather quickly, leading to further errors.
The transition to a new EHR system takes longer than anyone wants it to.
Elongating the process by stringing out the data migration via manual data entry seems less than prudent.
Every EHR vendor has sample data for use in training.
However, most of them will allow the use clinic data from a test conversion run for the training.
This serves a dual purpose.
The training is far more meaningful.
This is an excellent validation for the test conversion.
No one likes to hold their clinic's collective breath and manually track patient information while waiting for a data migration to be completed.
On the other hand, you can utilize multiple test runs to validate the conversion while active use of the old system continues.
When the final data conversion is run the down time is a few days, not several weeks.
Finally, if one data type, say immunizations, cannot be accurately converted it can be dropped from the conversion while retaining the other data that can be satisfactorily converted.
In summary, a good data conversion is well worth the effort and the cost.
The final analysis will show:
- a shortened time frame for the transition project
- fewer patient related problems
- lower overall costs
Source...