Advancing health information technology in
Minnesota and North Dakota.

EHR Services

Achieving meaningful use of your EHR

REACH services are designed to take your organization from its current state - whether you have no EHR or only need to optimize your current system—to stage 1 meaningful use in 12 months or less. Choose the services that meet your needs for adopting an electronic health record (EHR) or achieving meaningful use, including:

  • Readiness assessments—determining where your organization is on the continuum of readiness to adopt an EHR and providing a plan to prepare your organization for the EHR adoption process
  • Meaningful use assessment—performing detailed assessment and gap analysis of current meaningful use risk areas, prioritizing gaps, developing custom work plan based on priorities
  • Contract review and coaching—reviewing existing EHR vendor contract terms to identify key terms and conditions relating to EHR software and vendor performance regarding optimization and meaningful use, highlighting areas of concern
  • Assistance with project management infrastructure—assisting your project manager in developing a customized plan for successful adoption and achievement of meaningful use of an EHR. Offering a process to work with your selected vendor to ensure effective implementation of a certified EHR product. Providing other project management support where necessary
  • Organization and workflow redesign—planning and preparing for the cultural changes, as well as clinical, and business benefits of an EHR. Assisting you and your vendor(s) to implement and troubleshoot the use of the EHR system for the consistent documentation of essential clinical information in structured formats
  • Assisting you in selecting a certified EHR product that offers the best value for your needs—taking you from developing your system requirements/needs through your identifying the right vendor for you
  • Vendor contracting—providing sample contracts
  • EHR optimization and meaningful use—leveraging an EHR's potential to improve quality and value of care, by enhancing clinical and administrative workflows, process improvement, template building, and clinical decision support alignment
  • Basic report writing—assisting you to identify the measures to track, learning how to build reports to track those measures, providing recommendations for customization of forms for collection of quality data
  • Privacy and security best practices—providing training on how to comply with legal requirements to protect patient health information, including breach notification, risk mitigation, policy and procedure templates, and business associate management. Providing tools to assess current security and privacy compliance programs, and policy and procedure templates
  • Clinical decision support—educating and assisting with governance for managing rules, tuning alerts to meet objectives, and creating, tracking and managing changes in decision-support tools
  • Physician engagement—working with physicians and the care team so that they become involved in the EHR selection, implementation and become effective users. Providing physician-physician direct assistance with EHR adoption, training, use, and support needs
  • Individualized coaching support—for providers or teams that are having a particularly difficult time in using the EHR efficiently
  • Functional interoperability and health information exchange (HIE) assessment and guidance—helping with meaningful use stage 1 requirements for HIE.

REACH approach

Process consultation approach. The REACH approach focuses on providing you with the skills and tools needed to make changes in an informed and sustainable way. We teach you how to make HIT decisions, empowering you for the future because processes and technologies are constantly changing and you will need these skills going forward.

Organizational changes. Technology is the tool in EHR adoption, but successful use of that tool requires the right leadership, culture, process, and workflow. From our experience in providing technical assistance in EHR adoption and use, we know that these factors are critical for HIT success.

Varied types of assistance. REACH technical assistance is a mix of individualized on-site assistance with direct hands-on support, consultations, and group learning collaboratives. Educational resources include toolkits, educational Webinars, and links to best practices collected from the federal Office of the National Coordinator (ONC).

REACH support does not include funds for hardware or software for any provider.

REACH staff

REACH is staffed with physicians who have implemented and used EHRs, nurses, health information managers, information technology (IT) experts, leadership and communication coaches, and process and quality improvement specialists ready to assist your organization with optimizing its use of EHR.

REACH Staff >