Lake Health University

What's the cost of an EHR Implementation?

EMR’s are used by physicians to record and monitor the health metrics and personal information of their patients. It also offers decision support features that aid diagnosis, the creation of treatment plans, the prescribing of medicine, and the ordering of laboratory tests.

EHR Implementation Costs

After researching and shortlisting EMR/EHR products for your healthcare organization, you may check the prices and think your budget can accommodate them. But you still have to factor in the implementation costs. Each EMR or EHR product has its installation and deployment costs, and you need to be prepared for them. You can divide implementation expenses into indirect and direct costs.

Direct costs of a new EHR Implementation

According to data provided by HealthIT.gov , the cost of buying and installing an EHR varies from $15,000 to $70,000 per provider. However, in multi-physician healthcare facilities, the cost could be as high as $162,000. Thankfully, you can implement your new OneTouch EMR system for much less.

EHR deployment costs also vary depending on the type of deployment you choose. The two major types of deployment are on-site and cloud deployment also called SaaS. If you deploy the EHR solution at your hospital, you’ll incur additional hardware costs, and you’ll need to buy a software license that requires a sizable upfront fee. Adopting an on-site server model also means you’ll have to take care of the back-office technology needed to run the EHR including servers, data storage, and data backup.

On the other hand, cloud-based deployment requires you to store your healthcare and patient data on your vendor’s servers and gain access to it online. You’ll need to pay a monthly or annual subscription fee. Your vendor may also ask you to pay an initial set up fee, which is always smaller than the license fees paid for on-site deployment. While you won’t need to set up a back-office with heavy-duty servers and data backups, you may have to pay for a fixed number of users to access the software monthly. Your monthly access fee will increase if you need to give more employees access.

Indirect costs of a new EHR Implementation

Apart from upfront, setup, or access fees, your practice will also have to budget for indirect EHR implementation expenses. These expenses can be substantial, and you need to budget for them if you want to have a successful implementation.

The most important indirect costs include training costs, staffing, and the cost of loss of productivity during implementation. Ensure that you budget adequately for training all categories of employees that will use the EHR, including IT staff, clinicians, administrators, and others. During training, your doctors will spend less time taking care of patients, so you need to factor in this loss of productivity and attach a cost to it.

There is however an alternative, Learning as a Service (LaaS).

Learning as a Service (LaaS)

Live training is very valuable, but it can be incredibly expensive, and oftentimes falls short of the mark because it’s very easy for a trainer to miss key components of the training as individuals ask questions, and/or want to focus on topics they feel are most important to them.

Statistically, people retain just 40% of what they hear, leaving staff struggling to recall what was said during the training session. That rings true here as well, and in many cases, additional training becomes necessary in order to fill in the learning gaps, adding to the expense of it, along with delays in implementation.

You could expect to pay $100 per hour or more for live instructor training. Using our course as a basis for comparison, it would cost a practice more than $30,000 for all the training offered in our Master Courses, if taught by a live trainer, and your staff would only retain 40-50% of what was taught. Our (LaaS) courses are a fraction of that cost. And, once purchased, your staff may train at their own pace and refer back to it as often as they like for a refresher.

Learning as a Service, is a much more cost effective solution as it provides you with the ability to customize the training to your staff’s specific needs. It also allows you to control the costs and the implementation/training process in a more effective manner.

About our Individual Courses

More than 300 hours went into the creation of the programs listed below. Each course is broken down into easy to manage and understand lessons, each full of step-by-step instruction, video’s, screen shots, and quiz’s to make sure you fully understand the content. When a course has multiple lessons within it, the course will provide hyperlinks to specific topics within the course lesson making it easy to locate the specific training topic you’re looking for.

It was our goal in creating these courses, to be able to bring each individual within your practice the exact courses and lessons they need in order to perform their role effectively. Provide them with the ability to refresh their knowledge as often as needed, and do so in a cost efficient manner. We hope you enjoy the courses as much as we enjoyed making them for you.