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.

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.