Your practice might be in a situation to move to another Electronic Medical Records (EMR) Software or Practice Management Software solution. You’ve consulted other users, read authentic user reviews, and even watched software product demos helping you to make the necessary switch.

However, sometimes your existing EHR Software vendor might be holding you, hostage, by telling you that they won’t give you your patient data, or you’d simply have to pay an amount to get it.  This strategy to deny you your patient data in order to retain users who want to switch to a new software vendor is unbearable.

Reasons for switching your Existing EHR Software vendor

Conferring to Definitive healthcare data from 2020, 89 percent of all hospitals have implemented inpatient or ambulatory EHR systems. Hospitals might be dissatisfied with their existing software solution and may want a switch to a new software solution. This can be due to a number of reasons which result in dissatisfaction and inefficiency in your practice workflows. You might want a change when,

  • The current software system is not a scalable solution and is not growing with your practice.
  • You need additional features and tools to help streamline administrative, clinical, and financial workflows.
  • The interface didn’t turn out to be user-friendly and is clunky.
  • The customer support is below average and doesn’t help you when a technical fault or ant error occurs.
  • The existing software system has become outdated in terms of functionality.

Understanding EHR Data Hostage Situation

You need to clearly know your exit possibilities before you buy a new healthcare software system for your practice. It is important to ask these key four questions to avoid being held as a data hostage in the future.

Will the vendor provide data extraction services or will you do it yourself?

With an additional charge, some software vendors will provide data extraction services. However, if that’s not the case then you’d need to make sure that you have the right capabilities and tools for the data extraction process which is pretty complex.

What will the data extraction contain?

For Electronic Health records you must obtain all data and not only the Continuity of Care Document (CCD) as in the case with certified EHRs. CCD isn’t the full medical record for a patient.

Will the software vendor provide read-only access or pdfs of exams?

It is wise to know if the data provided will be in a usable format to be converted to your new software system. Usually, a .csv file is the most common format that can be easily converted by software vendors. Pdfs can be scanned into your new EHR Software system for reference but the data cannot be utilized for reporting and analysis.

What are the costs involved?

EHR software vendors charge a high fee of $10,000 or more for data extraction in order to stop you from leaving their services. It is advised that before you sign the final contract you know the exact costs of receiving your patient data.

Bottom Line

Your patients trust you with their health data so it is important that your practice partners with a software vendor that has a good retention rate and great reputation in the software market and doesn’t make your software switch into a nightmare.