EMR Consulting News and Insights

eClinicalWorks Workflow Optimization: 4 Workarounds to Audit

eClinicalWorks Workflow Optimization 1

Most practices blame their EHR the moment productivity starts slipping. But after reviewing dozens of eClinicalWorks environments, I’ve noticed something that rarely gets the attention it deserves: the biggest productivity killers usually aren’t the software. They’re the workarounds that were created years ago, quietly became “how we do things here,” and never got revisited.

Those workarounds are signals. They point to a gap between how eClinicalWorks was configured, how staff was trained, and how the practice actually operates today. That gap is where eClinicalWorks workflow optimization should begin.

The Best EHR Implementation I Ever Saw Was Not Run by IT

The Best EHR Implementation I Ever Saw Was Not Run by IT

The best EHR implementation I ever saw was not run by IT.

Working on the vendor side, I delivered the same software to organizations that got very different results from it. The product was not the variable. The consequences were.

In most implementations I delivered, the project lived inside IT. The business case justified the purchase, then went into a drawer. Department leaders showed up for demos, signed off on timelines, and reappeared at go-live to ask why things looked different.

The project team carried the weight, and when adoption lagged, it was treated as a training problem. The executives who approved the spend were rarely the ones accountable for the return. The most commonly blamed party was the vendor. Their poor implementation was why adoption struggled. It was not the whole story.

Optimizing athenaOne to Reduce Referral Leakage: A Story from the Field

Optimizing athenaOne to Reduce Referral Leakage

A few years ago, I worked with a large multispecialty medical group that believed they had a referral problem.

Their leadership team kept asking the same question: “Why are so many patients never making it to the specialist?”

At first glance, the numbers were alarming. Thousands of referrals were being generated, yet only a fraction ever resulted in completed specialty appointments.

The instinct was to launch a referral management program immediately.

Instead, I recommended something different: don’t build a solution until you’ve audited the process.

That recommendation changed everything.

Closed-Loop Referral Management in Post-Acute EHR: What to Look For

Closed Loop Referral Management in Post Acute EHR What to Look For

A referral left sitting in one queue for a few hours can be the difference between winning a case and losing it to whoever called back faster. If you are in the middle of an EHR selection right now, watch for one requirement agencies often underweight until it fails: a single hub for every referral channel.

Referrals come in by fax, by phone with someone typing what they hear, through Direct Secure Messaging, and electronically straight from the referring system. Most agencies still have staff checking four different places to find out what is waiting. That gap is where the risk sits.

Post-Acute EHR Vendor Proposal Review: A Guide from the Vendor Side

Post Acute EHR Vendor Proposal Review

Most problems in a software implementation don’t start at go-live. They start the day the contract is signed.

I spent nearly 30 years in healthcare IT, most of it on the vendor implementation side. One of the first things my team did after a deal closed was sit down and compare three things: the contract, the client’s expectations, and the full catalog of what we had available to sell. The gaps between those three told us exactly where the hard conversations would come from. Scope disputes. Missing interfaces. Features the client saw in a demo that weren’t in their package. It happened more than anyone on the vendor side would like to admit.

You can run that same review yourself, before you sign, when changes are still easy to make.

How EHR Training Turns Into Institutional Folklore

Post-Acute EHR Training

Somewhere around month six or nine, someone on your team resigned. A scheduler, maybe a clinical lead. Someone who sat through the go-live training, understood the reasoning behind how things were configured, and carried that context in their head every day.

Their replacement learned from someone else in the office who knew the area of the system they’d be working in. That person had already built a few workarounds of their own. Workarounds that made sense at the time but were never written down, never validated against the original configuration, and never reviewed by anyone who remembered why the system was set up the way it was.

A few months after that, three people were using the same feature three different ways. None of it was documented.

I’ve spent 30 years on the vendor side building, implementing, and optimizing post-acute EHR platforms. This pattern shows up in nearly every organization I work with. Not because the go-live training was bad. Usually it was good. Structured sessions, dedicated super-users, real documentation, protected time for clinical staff. The problem is what happens next.

HIMSS 2026: Deploying Clinical AI Requires Specialized EHR Staffing

HIMSS 2026 Agentic AI Specialized EHR staffing

The biggest healthcare IT conference of the year just wrapped. Here’s what actually matters, and what it means for the people running your EHR, and the growing demand for specialized EHR staffing to support it. Last week, roughly 24,000 healthcare IT professionals descended on Las Vegas for HIMSS 2026. If you followed the conference from […]

Strategic EHR Selection: Beyond the Demos

Strategic EHR Selection Beyond the Demos

Choosing an EHR system is one of the most high-stakes decisions a healthcare organization will make. The right platform can streamline operations, support clinical excellence, and drive long-term financial performance. The wrong one can create years of inefficiencies, frustrated staff, and costly workarounds. Because the stakes are so high, an unbiased, structured EHR selection process […]