EMR Success Stories - Jameson Orthopoedics

Location

Oak Park, Illinois

Number of EMR Users

Fourteen (14) physicians (including PAs), and thirty-two (32) clinical and support staff.

EMR Adoption Story

JO had a PM system for eight (8) years, and a stand-alone EMR system for two (2) years. Todd Ziemke, JO's IT Manager, comments further.

"Through 2008, I always felt that we were doing a decent job with IT. Users were mostly happy, and we were making improvements over time."

"In 2008 we made sort of a blunder. We tried to add a stand-alone EMR system to our technology base, and then integrate it with our old PM system. That turned out to be not such a good idea, and I have to accept the main responsibility for that course of action."

"We wasted a huge amount of time trying it integrate the new EMR solution with our existing PM solution. It was like oil and water. The two were never going to work together. We're glad to have that effort behind us."

Were We to Do It Over Again

"My advice to buyers of EMR systems is to buy an integrated solution, one integrated out of the box. Don't worry about capturing demographic data from an old PM system. There are lots of horror stories out there, but that part is really not that difficult. What's important is an integrated system because the practice of medicine and the billing for services are directly connected. In fact, they're intimately connected, and it's wrong to expect that you can easily patch a stand-alone PM system over to an EMR system, or vice versa."

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