EMR Consulting News and Insights

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 […]

EHR Strategy in 2026: Key Areas Healthcare Leaders Are Prioritizing This Year

EHR Strategy in 2026

Healthcare organizations typically begin each year with a set of goals and benchmarks, projecting a blueprint for what they would like to accomplish. As 2026 unfolds, the organization can set context for their goals in the real-world setting, prioritizing their plans and, as needed, recalibrating them. This recalibration can involve reassessing technology decisions made in […]