Terrill Jordan Discusses the Process of Customizing an EMR to Adapt to OCM

In order to adapt to the Oncology Care Model (OCM), Regional Cancer Care Associates had to undergo the process of adjusting and customizing its electronic medical records, explained CEO Terrill Jordan.

Transcript

Did you have to upgrade your electronic health records to adapt to OCM requirements, and what was that process like?

We did and it wasn’t so much as upgrade as we had to customize a lot of the workflows. What we found was that the EMRs weren’t developed with value based in mind while there were a lot of structure fields, the structure fields weren’t in a place to be used within the workflow. So what we had to do was customize little drop down boxes, we had to customize different fields so our clinicians could put structured data in along with their daily exercise of seeing patients. That was the main change with the EMR.

In terms of some of the other software we had, we found that a lot of the other software wasn’t meant to interface with the EMR—and the EMR being so critical to our understanding of the clinical, marrying that up with the claims data, marrying that up with our payment data—we found that the interface was also an issue.