Smaller Hospital’s New EHR Helps It Achieve a 5-Star CMS Rating

Physicians were frustrated by the cumbersome user experience of their EHR, which made for endless clicking and time-consuming documentation. Many felt like the EHR had been designed more for regulatory compliance and billing than for improving patient care.

The EHR also was exorbitantly expensive, executives said, especially for a smaller hospital like LADMC. It was an on-premises solution, as well, so there were significant IT, maintenance and consulting costs involved.

“Another problem was that our EHR wasn’t interoperable with other EHR systems,” said Dilip Niranjana Jay, IT administration lead at LADMC. “As an inner city hospital, a lot of our patients are not seeing our hospital exclusively. If a patient’s medical data was with a hospital whose EHR wasn’t interoperable with ours, it would be difficult to get a complete picture of their medical history, impeding our ability to ensure continuity of care.”