Implementation Guidance for Your New EHR Software for Mental Health

Finding a top electronic health record (EHR) for your mental health organization can help improve everything from the effectiveness of care delivery to the optimization of billing procedures. But selecting the right EHR software for mental health is just the first step — implementation matters, too.

The way you implement an EHR matters so much, in fact, that it can make the difference between bolstering or hindering your staff’s work. One study found that about two-thirds of change projects in healthcare settings fail because of bad planning, unmotivated staff, and poor communication.

Follow these five key steps of EHR implementation to avoid these common pitfalls.

1. Plan Ahead for Your EHR Implementation

Far too often, healthcare facilities move straight to integration after adopting a new technology. But new systems mean new workflows, new responsibilities, and a learning curve that all need to be planned for ahead of time. Your pre-implementation checklist should include:

• Choosing an EHR tailor-made for the mental health care space. Studies show that the way an EHR or electronic medical record (EMR) fits within the healthcare setting and existing workflows can impact the success of implementation. Start by selecting a platform that’s built specifically for mental health. Doing so will save you considerable implementation time and resources and should help improve staff adoption while reducing staff resistance.
• Defining clear EHR implementation goals. This requires you and your team to first assess your needs: Do you want to improve documentation efficiency? Streamline your billing procedures? Reduce administrative burden? Articulating your goals at the start helps ensure everyone is on the same page and bought into the implementation process.
• Identifying key stakeholders. Who should be involved in the implementation process, and what should their specific responsibilities be? Your implementation team should represent all areas of the clinic, including providers, administrative staff, and IT representatives, and involve one or more superusers.
• Assigning roles. After you’ve established your team, assign key roles like project manager, project sponsor, training lead, and data migration lead. Draw on your staff’s expertise to ensure people are assigned the right roles.
• Establishing a timeline. Develop a realistic timeline for deployment, testing, and training of the new EHR software for mental health, with defined milestones and checkpoints along the way. Ensure you build in methods and times for obtaining staff feedback so you can address issues as they occur.
• Communicate early and prepare your team for change. Even if you haven't fully decided on an EHR solution, inform your broader team that you're seeking a new platform, including the reasons why. Share your implementation goals with the team to help them prepare for the change.

2. Integrate the System and Migrate Data

The right EHR software for mental health can give you easy access to organized, real-time data. This can help providers deliver more personalized care, more effectively address health-related social needs (HRSN), enable efficient measurement-based care, optimize billing protocols, and more. Migrating data to a consolidated central source of truth is a critical step toward realizing these benefits. Follow these steps:

• Identify and collect data. Gather all data — including client records, client clinical data, demographic data, and clinic financial data — from all disparate sources.
• Review the rules. Identify and understand federal, state, and local data-protection rules to be sure you’re aligning with privacy laws as you migrate data. Review the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for information on HIPAA laws.
• Move data to the new EHR. According to IDS, there are two primary approaches to data migration. The incremental approach involves running your old systems and your new platform at the same time, while migrating data in small batches. The “big bang” approach involves migrating large swaths of data all at once. Taking stock of how much and what kinds of data you have will help you decide which approach is best for your organization.
• Ensure compatibility with your existing tools. Good EHRs work seamlessly with other billing, scheduling, and telehealth tools. Great EHRs, however, have those capabilities embedded directly into their platforms.
• Establish permissions. Not everyone in your care network will need or should have access to the same data. Take the time now to establish role-based permissions and set up role-specific data dashboards for each person in your care continuum.

Before going live with your new EHR software for mental health, test a small batch of data to address potential data integrity issues, fix errors, and adjust permissions. If possible, set up a simulated or test environment to enable users to get more comfortable using and interacting with the EHR before the system goes live.

3. Train Staff and Manage Change

As one study notes, poor usability of these kinds of systems can impact both the quality of care delivered and client safety. Ensuring staff use the new system often and well comes down to effective EHR training. Be sure to:

• Engage staff early. Invite key staff members to collaborate during the implementation process. If they're using the system day to day, allow their voices to be heard, answer questions, and address any concerns. An EHR company that truly partners with their customers should be willing to help with staff engagement, and improving staff engagement should translate to improved implementation success.
• Develop a training plan. Ad hoc support is always helpful, but the most successful EHR implementation will involve a carefully drawn-out training plan with timelines, assessments, and scheduled sessions.
• Meet team members where they are. Account for varying levels of digital literacy and develop different kinds of training to ensure everyone learns at their own pace and comfort levels. Use both role-based and process-based trainings, which focus on individuals’ responsibilities and overarching clinical workflows, respectively.
• Personalize training. Clearly communicate how the system resonates with each person’s individual role, and show users how the platform will improve the efficiency of their work. Since everyone learns differently, use various methods — like visual, textual, or hands-on training — to adapt to different learning styles.
• Assign superusers. As expert users and ambassadors, superusers will help secure buy-in for the new system and can assist in training others, especially those with low digital literacy skills.
• Manage change. Some people will inevitably be hesitant to change. Review the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s eight steps of effective change management to learn how to manage resistance and drive morale. Also, emphasize the “why,” speaking to matters like why this change will be beneficial for your team and why it will be beneficial for the clients you serve.

Change is difficult for any organization. That’s why the best EHR vendors offer hands-on training and ongoing support to ease the transition to a new system. Consider working with your vendor to make EHR implementation and EHR training a breeze.

4. Test and Go Live

A research team at the University of Missouri’s School of Medicine evaluated 13 EHR features using a custom usability program and found that 70% of usability concerns were correctable. Their takeaway? Site-specific user testing can help detect problems before they become pervasive. Take these steps:

• Launch a pilot phase before deploying fully. Testing specific parts of the EHR or deploying the system to a small number of users before going fully live can save time and headaches. During this pilot phase, assess usability, permissions, security issues, data access, and workflows to better ensure everything is working properly.
• Build in time for troubleshooting. After the system goes live, questions will pop up, workflow issues will occur, and technical problems might happen. Expect to spend some time during the first few months troubleshooting errors, answering questions, and executing process improvements.
• Monitor staff feedback. Draw on the timelines and checkpoints you established in your EHR implementation plan to regularly check in with your staff. Collect performance data to make sure the system is leading to increased productivity and other goals.

5. Achieve Post-Implementation Optimization

Implementing EHR software for mental health isn’t just a one-and-done process. Teams will need ongoing iteration and adaptive planning to keep pace with new learnings or workflow changes. As such, be sure to:

• Evaluate the system regularly. Establish routine system and staff check-ins to make any necessary workflow adjustments and address technical issues.
• Leverage EHR analytics. There’s always room for growth and added efficiency, so rely on the data your EHR software for mental health provides to assess clinical and operational needs. Then, work with your vendor to implement new tools that might help meet those needs.
• Offer continuous training. To maximize the long-term benefits of your EHR, find ways to provide ongoing training. It’s typical for productivity to wane a bit after implementing a new system. But if that lull lasts longer than a few months, there might be kinks that need to be worked out.

Selecting the Right EHR Software for Mental Health

EHR software for mental health can drastically improve a clinic’s administrative productivity and client care delivery. And a robust solution like Core’s Cx360 platform offers game-changing capabilities within a central, intuitive tool. Core even offers full-service implementation support to enable organizations to get up and running on Cx360 as quickly and smoothly as possible.

Get a demo today to learn what the Cx360 platform and the Core Solutions team can do for your organization.