Title: Vendor Selection and Clinical Decision Support Applications for EHR Implementation

The Director at the hospital assigns you a very important task in rolling out an EHR: investigating vendors. She recommends researching different vendors. The two of you discuss some important questions to determine what is needed to meet your organization’s needs:
What software and hardware is needed to implement an EHR?
What features of an EHR are must-haves?
What features are strong wants, but not absolutely necessary?
What does one vendor have that the other doesn’t?
Your budget has a limit. Will this vendor meet your budget?
Compare alternatives: The lower-cost product does not have a physician order component, which means physician orders will be hand-written and you will have to scan them to add to the EHR. The mid-cost product does not link to diagnostic reports. The higher-cost product gives you the convenience of a fully electronic record, but at a price. You still must budget for scanners, because you know there are still paper documents that the HIM department receives that will need to be added to the EHR.
Deliverable:
In your initial post, research and evaluate two different vendors and recommend one of them to the Director and add the reasons why you picked one vendor over the other.
In at least one of your responses to your classmates, evaluate their decision and either recommend actions for them OR debate why they chose a certain vendor.
Investigate clinical decision support applications and provide a summary of one (1) of the applications that you find. Please provide facts about the applications and answer the following questions:
What does the application do?
How does the application help the user?
Examples of decision support applications include: DxPlain®, QMR®, Prodigy®, Diagnosis Pro®, Iliad®, and Problem Knowledge Couplers®
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