Going Live: The First Day of an EMR to EMR Transition

By Emerson Posadas MD MBA PGY-2

This is the first of a series of blog posts about administrative and management aspects of the Emergency Department. The first blog in this series describes the transition from one electronic medical record (EMR) system to a new one in our own Emergency Department and all the challenges we faced.

As part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, all pubic and private healthcare providers were required to adopt electronic medical records in 2014. There have been multiple articles on the transition from paper charting to EMR. However, not much has been discussed regarding the transition from one EMR system to another one. With an ever-increasing amount of electronic platforms available, EMR transitions are a common challenge faced by many hospital systems. At University Medical Center of Southern Nevada (UMC) we recently transitioned from McKesson software to EPIC software as our primary EMR system. With this, there were multiple opportunities to improve our workflow and operations in the emergency department. However, as with all transitions this was not as seamless as envisioned.

Read More