PRACTICE PARTNER
physicians using EMRs than all the other
provinces combined.
But while clinicians across the province
have begun to embrace digital health, many
have yet to realize the full potential of
EMRs, said Sarah Hutchison, CEO, Ontari-
oMD.
“When EMR use hit the tipping point in
the province, we shifted our mandate from
playing a lead role in EMR adoption to
instead focusing on providing advice to help
clinicians learn how to get the most from
their EMRs,” she said.
Dr. Jeff Habert, a family physician from
Thornhill, has been an OntarioMD Peer
Leader since 2012 and a College assessor
since 2004. Wearing both hats has allowed
him to help doctors understand how to
better optimize their EMRs from both a
technical and clinical perspective. He says he
frequently meets with doctors who’ve been
using an EMR for several years, but who still
have not explored its full potential. In many
of these cases, he sees that their frustration is
rooted in three things: lack of training, data
input, and organization of patient informa-
tion. By focusing on these areas, Dr. Habert
can usually help his colleagues realize signifi-
cant EMR gains in a short period of time.
“I always hear that an EMR is a lot of work.
That may be true for up to 12 months. But
anyone who says this after 12 months with
an EMR is doing something wrong,” says
Dr. Habert.
Take the training
Dr. Habert says most of the clinicians he works
with as a Peer Leader were never fully trained
on the technology. While lack of time is a fact
of life in any busy practice, the first step in
realizing the full power of EMRs is to under-
stand how they work – and how they can be
adapted to fit a practice’s unique needs.
“Doctors who adopt an
EMR and don’t learn
about its full potential
and how it can fit into
their workflow will never
optimize its potential,”
he says. “It’s like buying a
car – if you drive off the lot
without having gone through
the training session with the
dealer, you’ll never understand all of your
car’s capabilities.”
Several hours of vendor-led training are
built into the price of an EMR. But many
physicians only take advantage of a small
portion of this time. Dr. Habert stresses that
clinicians should tap into every minute of
initial training avail able to them – and buy
more hours from the vendor if needed. After
that, he advises doctors to experiment with
the EMR for six months to understand it and
determine how it can fit into workflows, and
then contact an OntarioMD Peer Leader to
help understand how the technology can be
optimized to fill any workflow gaps.
Dr. Jeff Habert, a
College assessor
and Peer Leader
Quality in, quality out
The most common issue for physicians who
have received insufficient training on their
EMRs is patient data being inefficiently or
incorrectly entered into the EMR. He says
it’s not enough to simply enter accurate
patient data into the right areas of an EMR.
In order to take advantage of many of the
advanced EMR features like tracking and
managing target patient populations and
generating recall lists, all data needs to be
entered using standardized terms so it’s easily
searchable.
He calls the cumulative patient profile
(CPP) the “backbone” of any good EMR.
Moreover, the College’s Medical Records
policy states that for family physicians
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