Pediatric EMR 

Having been in the Medical Information Technology field for quite some time now.  We know the importance of system selection and the care that must go into the criteria and RFI.  Pediatric EMR requires certain data elements and is crucial to the success of system use, performance, and integration.

The following are quick checks that should be carried out before even inviting the first vendor for a demo demo:

• Check with the IT department you are affilated with. It's possible they have other physicians using a pediatric emr system that could:
• Suit your needs and save you time and effort.
• You could be eligible for volume discount licensing.
  
• Provide as a first hand reference.
• If they have an EMR soultion, you could save potentially thousands of dollars on paying for interfaces to existing hospital integration systems.
  
• Chances are they have also looked into and EMR solution and will have an RFI template which you can add upon versus "recreating the wheel".
  
• Not including IT in the beginning poses many difficulties for implementation  and integration further down the road. 
• Incompatibilities with what you want, could be more costly than the EMR solution itself.  The more customizations and variances off the seed product results in
• High Costs
• Your system will be to unique.  This is important because if your EMR system should crash and need to be rebuilt, these customizations are very difficult to reimplement and cause excessive downtime.

RFI Considerations:

• Ease of customizations - any database hierarchy changes result in difficulties, should the system need to be restored.
• Number of staff needed to support the system.
• Skill level of the system administrator
• Time to Implement once the PO is signed.
• Onsite project manager
• Is the EMR solution being offered built on a Pediatric EMR system or an Adult EMR system modified to capture pediatric data.
• Disk Space per patient
• Vendor Support structure

Having implemented hundreds of systems for hospitals, physicians, and clinics I know the importance of committing IT to the project.  Too many times have we gotten a call saying a doctor wants to install xyz system.  In more cases than not, it ends up costing the physician 35% more than the budgeted costs because of the  unexpected requirements needed to support the application in the hospital environment.  

Here are some of the costs that have taken physicians by surprise:

• Network issues 
• Not enough network ports
• Bandwidth not sufficient - Pediatric EMR requires multiple images for storage
  
• Network equipment needs to be on a VLAN 
• Computers need to be replaced - Doesn't meet vendor's minimum requirements.
• OS versions do not meet minimum requirements
• The skill level of the system administrator in not adequate with the physicians staff.
• The Number 1 issue is the hospital IT staff have other projects going on that comflict with your install, implementation, testing, and/or go-live plans. 

 http://www.pediatric-emr.com