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Category Archives: Integration

Harnessing that free energy in healthcare.

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healthcare free employee time

This isn’t about powering your data center with solar cells on the helipad. It’s actually about capturing the creativity and time that you’re already paying for. Clinical staff inside hospitals are powerhouses of innovation and creativity. Have you seen what a nurse can do with a roll of 3M transpore tape?!

I only half kid about the tape, but anyone who has tried to introduce new solutions and technology into a clinical workspace has undoubtedly been met with skepticism. Anyone who has gone back to see how those systems and tools are actually used, has undoubtedly been surprised to see how and if they were used.

Are those tablets waterproof? They make great trays for carrying medications and water.

Giving clinical staff back time to focus on their patients and get creative with solutions for systems, processes, and technology innovation can be invaluable. In a time when doctors, nurses and technologists are leaving the bedside and joining tech companies, it can be more important than ever to retain that staff and capture those ideas. Many of these ideas are not large scale changes to the macro environment, they are small and relatively simple ideas that make interactions and workflows easier that can lead to better engagement.

How do you give back time? When we think of the time wasted on inefficient processes, especially when it comes to inefficient IT systems, there is a large opportunity to free up time. In previous posts I’ve written about the inefficiency of reporting application and integration outages and how early notification can save clinical time.

How do you harness that “free” energy? Since you’re already paying for it, it’s not really free, maybe it’s more akin to installing a co-generation plant. When you alleviate the burden of reporting IT issues by clinical staff, they are free to focus on their patients, to address their patient’s needs, concerns, and monitor for their safety. Time and attention lead to fewer safety incidents and better outcomes. Beyond that when clinical staff have time to consider their workflows and systems interactions they will come up with better ideas.

Consider all the money spent on “solutions” and upgrades that do not yield expected results. When a new solution is proposed how much engagement are clinical staff able to give before a purchase? How much time and energy are they able to spend making the new solution work? How much thought are they able to give to iterating and improving EHR user interfaces and workflows? All of these things take time, and if they don’t have time, all these solutions will seldom achieve their full potential.

Leveraging IT assets to their fullest potential will improve the ROI, in addition to improving margins. For over 10 years Tido Inc. has been partnering with hospitals and healthcare organizations to leverage the most from their IT infrastructure. Automated applications and interfaces monitoring and alerts, application integration, and assisting with digital strategy. Contact us today to see how we can help capture some of that energy!

I wonder if solar panels on a helipad would work? I think I’ve found today’s rabbit hole!

Is there an orchard full of apples just outside the windows of the hospital?

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Have you ever switched from an Apple iPhone to a Samsung or other Google based phone, or vice versa? It looks familiar, but it’s just different enough to be confusing. I know… I’ve done it. Work issued iPhone, personal Samsung phone. I was able to turn my iPhone notification to vibrate when I first got it… For the next 5 years I could not turn any notification sound on. I’m not new to smart phones, but I’ve always had a Samsung, the IOS screen looks familiar, but it just doesn’t work the same.  I only used the work phone for texting and phone calls, everything else was my personal phone, good thing my scrubs had two pockets.

Websites and apps can experience similar issues with back-end functionality. With the patients, visitors and employees all having different smart-phones, ensuring a seamless end-user experience can be more important than ever. Developing a website or app for a Windows based system may not be able to viewed in the Apple ecosystem.

Everything from way-finding apps, employee intranet sites, public websites, to patient access apps all need to be customized to ensure an end-user experience that is accessible and usable. Imagine telling a patient “there’s an app for that!” only to have them frustrated when they can’t access the information they were directed to. It doesn’t provide a good experience for the patient that can negatively impact things as serious as missing important appointments, to just experiencing un-warranted stress when trying to get to an appointment. Is a patient going to rate you 5 stars if they can’t find the doctor?

Similarly for employees, frustrations can abound when apps are not optimized for different mobile devices. Apps for time and attendance, intranet sites for policies and procedures, are all often made accessible for employees to use on their mobile devices. Apps and sites that are not optimized for their device can frustrate staff trying to request a vacation, or trying to look up policies for titrating insulin drips.

Accessibility in the physical world is important for healthcare, it is just as important in the digital age to have accessibility online as well. Ramifications can be a minor inconvenience or a major frustration. More and more information resources are moved online to save paper and ensure the most up-to-date information is being used, having access is vital to smooth patient experience and care.

How do you test apps and mobile sites for compatibility against thousands of different versions of mobile devices? Ten thousand engineers typing on ten thousand phones for ten thousand years? That might work, or you might get a mobile friendly version of Shakespeare. Hope you have a good IT recruiter!

Automated testing at every stage of development can help ensure accessibility is maintained across desktops and mobile devices. For over 10 years Tido Inc has partnered with hospitals and health systems to provide automated mobile and web testing at every stage of development. Ensuring minimal issues on launch, and faster development times. Contact us today to see how we can help, from development of custom apps and intranet sites, we can extend your IT teams when you need.

Freeing up staff to focus on patients… What can we learn from the ticker tape?

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Applications and Integration Monitoring - Ticker

Ticker tape was a revolutionary tool for moving information fast. Widely used by the financial industry for the quick transmittal of stock prices, sports reporters used it relay scores, and in many other industries for relaying information fast to people who didn’t necessarily know Morse code. Ever wonder where the 3-4 letter symbols for stocks and sports teams came from? How about the traditional 15 minute delay for financial information? Ticker tapes. Crazy right? Traditional ticker tapes went out with the 60’s (1960’s that is), but today we see “ticker tape” scrolls at the bottom of screens and on LED billboards.

Back to the question at hand… What can we learn from ticker tape? Getting information from the people that have it to the people that need in a timely manner can have a real improvement in operations, saving time and freeing up valuable manpower to handle other tasks.

Having a simple scroll at the bottom of the clinician’s screen showing important information can save time, and reduce frustration. Health systems have numerous moving parts and inter-connected technology. When something breaks, who reports it? The front line clinical staff. When an application / system (EHR, Pharmacy, Laboratory, PACS, Mobile, Web Applications) or interface fails , every clinician is impacted at the same time. Problem with the pharmacy network, blood bank, PACS? The front line staff calls the department first, once they are aware there is a problem, then a person from each department will call help desk. This is where the cascade begins.

In large units there will likely be 2 or 3 people calling the help desk before the word gets around to the rest of the unit. Multiply this time X number of units. The calls quickly overwhelm the most well-staffed help desks. What happens when an upgrade impacts more than one system? Gridlock, like a ticker tape parade in New York City.

Automated end-to-end applications and integration monitoring coupled with real information can be a powerful tool to alert front-line staff of application issues, alleviating the need of multiple calls to the help desk. Freeing front-line staff from calling the help desk, and associated wait time, allows them to keep their focus where it belongs, on the patients. Early awareness allows early response and early action, any clinician will tell you this is key to preventing larger health problems down the road. This is just as true for our IT systems.

Automated end-to-end applications and integration monitoring monitoring can alert IT staff to problems early, allowing faster response and resolution, before the calls to the help desk and online tickets quickly overwhelm departments. IT staff can focus on resolving the problem, not resolving the tickets.

Providing high quality patient care is the mission of any hospital or health system, the networks and systems in place are there to support this mission. At a time when health systems need to get the most out of their current FTEs, effectively utilizing technology to quickly relay important information saves time and money, but more importantly, it can help take one more burden off of our front-line clinical staff. For more than 10 years Tido Inc has been partnering with hospitals and health systems get the most out of their IT infrastructure, from advisory services, to systems integration, to Automated end-to-end applications and integration monitoring, we’re here to help extend the reach of your IT department. Want to know how?! Of course you do! Contact us today, we’re happy to connect see how we can help.

It’s winter, are your data pipes frozen?

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Frozen data pipes

Winter can be brutal on pipes, one little spot of missed insulation can cause an air leak that freezes your water pipes. Fortunately there are various systems that can alert you to problems, infrared cameras to detect leaks before there’s a problem, and water sensors to alert when there is a leak.  Imagine testing or monitoring our IT systems like we test and monitor our homes.  Check the systems before there is a problem, or alert us early to take action when there is a problem.  Healthcare is ever more reliant on data flows and pipes to connect the various systems and ensure smooth operation. But how are these problems recognized? Who reports them? Is there an early detection system to alert when there is a problem?

When we build a house it is important to ensure all the pipes are connected and all those insulation trouble spots are tightly sealed to prevent problems down the road when the new owners move in. Fortunately there are infrared cameras and blower door tests for homes to discover potential problem areas. When we’re building new solutions into healthcare networks there are countless points of failure that can occur when systems go live, and with the proliferation of new applications from patient monitoring to clinician web-based and mobile apps, the number of potential points of failure increase. Do we have an infrared camera or blower door test for the maze of networks in a healthcare facility? Testing every connection for a new system, upgrading systems, or implementing a new mobile app will quickly overwhelm even the most well-staffed IT department. Test automation can quickly, efficiently, and repeatedly test systems to ensure that all functionality will perform as expected and provide the end-user experience that is desired.

As much as we can prepare our home ahead of time, sometimes there are events outside of the home that will cause things to go awry. Problems with the electrical grid, gas network or even water distribution can lead to unexpected problems in the home and cause catastrophic leaks. Fortunately we also have tools to monitor the state of our home in the event a change on the outside causes a problem on the inside. Leak detectors can alert homeowners to potential problems, allowing quick action to prevent flooded basements and avoid the physical and emotional stress that comes with clean-up. Similarly in healthcare continuously monitoring networks and automatic notification of an issue can prevent stress on the end-user that relies on these systems for patient. Too often when networks go down, often due to an upgrade or issue beyond the walls of the facility, the end-user is the first to notice. It’s not just one end-user that’s impacted, it can be thousands, and they will start calling the help desk. Applications and Integration monitoring can sound an early alarm and allow IT teams to respond quickly to an event, end-users can be notified early, and IT teams can work quickly to minimize disruption and stress. IT teams should be aware of an IT issue before the end-user, network monitoring can facilitate this.

Back in 2021 research found that one-third of healthcare workers felt that technology contributed to emotional exhaustion, and were frustrated at least 3-5 days per week. In the past 2 years since the study was done, the number of applications and solutions has only increased, as has the technology burden on clinical staff. Clinical staff works to take care of the patient, they seek to prevent problems for patients before they occur, shouldn’t IT systems do the same?

Nobody wants to deal with frozen pipes or disconnected networks. For over 10 years Tido Inc has helped healthcare organizations save over $30 million with our integration and testing packages. Connect with us today and see how Tido Inc can partner with your teams to help build a tighter, better connected, healthcare house.

Healthcare technology in 2023 and beyond!

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Healthcare 2023

We’re not making definitive predictions here, but the rapid changes seen in healthcare have been remarkable these past years, and going into 2023 we can be certain there will be new challenges and opportunities. We do expect some themes to continue into 2023 and beyond.

Challenging margins for health systems and independent practices. As reimbursements to health care organizations has languished, the importance of ensuring the maximum returns on existing investments will be key. Over the past decade there have been massive investments in new systems and networks, every part of healthcare operations has been connected to a tech-enabled system. To realize the gains promised these networks need to be functional and reliable. Are your systems working like they’re supposed to? Or does the staff have the impression that ‘nothing works like it supposed to!’ Disconnected applications or unforeseen application issues can cause significant delays, frustrate staff, and waste valuable time. Applications and Integration monitoring can ensure those technology investments are pulling their weight and maximizing return, supporting clinical staff and powering seamless operations.

Healthcare worker burnout and moral injury are likely to be concerns into 2023 and beyond. Network reliability can be a source of frustration for clinicians, reliable systems are one component of providing a high quality experience, interfaces and tools that provide a better working environment will certainly be another. The proliferation of apps and tools to enhance user experience for both patient and clinician will likely continue, albeit at a slower rate than prior years. Having the best possible tools and apps can be a key strategy to keeping employees engaged and patient focused, whether it is a third party app or custom mobile and web applications, new solutions will continue to be front and center.

Over the past few years we have seen a massive shift in how healthcare is delivered, from a largely in-person environment toward more telehealth and virtual solutions than ever before. While there has been slowing in the market for many of these independent services, telehealth will continue to be a necessity for any health service moving forward. In a distributed clinical environment current systems may not be enough to have a fully functional clinic. EHRs optimized for in-person care may not work with distributed clinical staff, will other solutions be utilized? What portions of intake can be automated, how will those answers be populated into the EHR and get to right clinician at the right time? Is the right patient information populating over, medication history, allergies, radiology reports, the list can be daunting. If a new system is being implement over existing infrastructure ensuring adequate testing and integration will be key to enabling high quality patient care. Moving to a new EHR can pose even more challenges, migrating data is complex and requires a high degree of certainty. Managing these data sharing challenges will continue to be a priority as care becomes more distributed beyond a single physical site.

Maybe we’ll offer one prediction for 2023… Tido Inc. will be here and continue partnering with health systems and practices to face a challenging and changing technology landscape! Reach out today, we’re happy to work with you to face the healthcare challenges in this year, and beyond.

Have the holidays driven us crazy? Crazy about AI maybe!

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AI in Healthcare

Have you heard all the rage in AI? ChatGPT was making the rounds last few weeks as it was open to the public to play around with. The website is pretty cool, but it did take me a few days to get on it to play around due to traffic. For last week’s blog post I decided to hop on the bandwagon and see if Artificial Intelligence could replace a content writer’s Human Intelligence (insert sarcastic comment). Don’t tell the boss I did this though, AI doesn’t have bills to pay. Seriously though, the other blog post last week was written by ChatGPT.

Whether AI, ML, or other letter combination when it comes to advanced computing, there is no doubt that language processing will find it’s way more and more into healthcare. How do I know this? Because AI told me so, go read the other post!

Integrating AI effectively into the clinical space can help nursing in a variety of ways. It can be used to aggregate information on a single patient about their current visit and past visits to help guide interventions. It can also be used to effectively aggregate patient data from large populations to help study the effectiveness of new interventions vs past interventions.

Maybe we use the AI to write custom discharge instructions that are patient specific and relevant to their care? Starting off with a basic template this can be really powerful to drive better engagement and adherence to instructions. Current discharge instructions are often pages long with information dispersed throughout a large packet, providing a succinct summary can make it much easier for patients.

ChatGPT was initially devised as a chat bot, often rudimentary forms of chatbots can be found for patient intake for medical practices, urgent care, or to guide patients toward specialists. If we can better aggregate these sessions into a basic medical history or offer guidance toward potential diagnosis, then there can be significant time savings just on the nursing triage.

Pretty cool stuff that has the potential to really improve healthcare by helping the clinician and the patient alike.

With integrating any computer process automation there are several concerns that arise.

What is the reference source material? In the case of ChatGPT it uses large databases of published material, this can include unverified sources or opinion pieces. With any AI/ML, knowing the referenced source will be important.

Is the output relevant? AI can be confused, just like me, but we often use slang terms that AI may not recognize, this can lead to some weird output. The output definitely needs to be reviewed by professionals.  In the other post there are number of inaccuracies when it comes to the semantics, but they do matter.

How will it be integrated? Is it clear to patients when they are interacting with AI vs. a real human? If not it can be upsetting and cause patients to lose faith in the care system.

How much do we rely on AI? FDA regulations are starting to address this in terms of decision support, but how far AI goes into making patient care and treatment decisions that may fall into a gray area that can be difficult to navigate and ultimately requires a trained professional to adjudicate.

Tido Inc can help your organization answer these questions and help to integrate or develop applications so your organization can effectively leverage AI and ML to help improve clinical workflows and experience.  Now let’s see how much Holiday shopping has messed with my Amazon algorithms!

AI will revolutionize nursing! – Written by AI

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AI in Healthcare

As we continue to advance in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), it’s becoming increasingly clear that this technology has the potential to revolutionize the way we approach healthcare, including the field of nursing. In the next few years, we can expect to see AI being used in a wide range of applications, from improving the accuracy of medical diagnoses to helping nurses manage their workloads more effectively.

One of the most exciting ways that AI is set to transform nursing is through its ability to improve the accuracy of medical diagnoses. AI algorithms are capable of analyzing vast amounts of data, including medical images and test results, to identify patterns and make predictions about a patient’s condition. This can help nurses to make more accurate diagnoses, and it can also help to identify potential health problems before they become more serious.

In addition to improving diagnostic accuracy, AI can also be used to help nurses manage their workloads more effectively. By analyzing data on patient visits and treatment outcomes, AI algorithms can help to identify trends and patterns that can be used to improve the efficiency of healthcare delivery. This can help to reduce wait times and improve patient outcomes, while also allowing nurses to focus on the patients who need their help the most.

Another way that AI is set to transform nursing is through its ability to improve the effectiveness of certain treatments. AI algorithms can be used to analyze the data from clinical trials and other studies to identify the most effective treatments for specific conditions. This can help nurses to make more informed decisions about which treatments to prescribe to their patients, which can lead to better health outcomes.

Overall, the potential of AI to transform nursing is enormous. As we continue to develop and refine these technologies, we can expect to see a wide range of benefits for both patients and nurses. Whether it’s improving diagnostic accuracy, helping nurses manage their workloads, or identifying the most effective treatments for specific conditions, AI has the potential to make a huge impact on the field of nursing.

**This blog post written by AI, I was busy and had holiday shopping to do.  Here was the request:  “Write a 500 word blog post on how AI will transform nursing in the style of Johnathan Klaus”

Tido Inc. can help with digital strategy and custom applications!

What’s on your wish list for the Holidays?

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Holidays Wish List for Healthcare

For many healthcare organizations software is a strategic priority for the coming year. According to a research paper by Klas Research and Bain & Company, 40% of provider organizations have software as their top strategic priority, for 80% it’s in their top three. Even for those provider organizations that did not list software as a strategic priority, 95% expect to make new software purchases.

Why a focus on software? Labor shortages are well known, physicians and other clinical staff are pressed to do more with fewer staff. Software can help ease administrative burdens, improve billing accuracy and receipts, as well as help clinical staff provide better and more accurate care faster to more patients. From the patient satisfaction perspective, the right software can improve patient engagement and experience from the first contact, improving outcomes and health.

According to he research linked above, Revenue Cycle, Security, Patient intake/flow, Clinical Systems and Telehealth were the top 5 solutions that provider organizations want to focus on. There are a lot of offerings out there promising solutions to these problems and many others. In the clinical space the internet of things, artificial intelligence (AI) tools, machine learning (ML) tools have exploded in the past few years, and there are more companies offering more solutions every day.

Beyond physician staff, nursing and other clinical support staff look to software and digital tools to improve care and coordination. Clinical staff want tools that work and ease their burden, allowing more time to focus on the patient’s that need care and attention. Nurses have been more vocal about getting the right tools for patient care, opinion pieces like this one in Nursing Times are appearing in forums more and more frequently.

Finding the right software is the first part of the challenge, and for clinicians the evaluation of software may be the easiest part to answer. There are still a variety of other questions that need to be answered before implementing a new solution. As anyone involved in healthcare knows, it’s never as easy as downloading an app from the Google Play Store.

Is the solution going to solve your problem?

How will the software be implemented?

Is the infrastructure in place to support the software?

Does the implementation require EHR integration?

Will it actually work when the switch is flipped to go live?

With any integration and roll-out there will always be more questions that come up during the process. All of these questions will need to be answered to ensure seamless integration and roll out of software packages. Patient care should be a seamless journey, so should software integration and upgrades. IT systems should work just as hard as the clinical staff to provide a seamless experience for all users.

Since 2007 Tido Inc. has a history of partnering with healthcare organizations and hospitals to help answer these questions and many more. Contact Tido Inc. to talk about their integration and test automation packages to leverage your existing infrastructure and maximize the ROI on software investments.

Healthcare M&A… Another present for the holidays?

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Healthcare Mergers and Acquisition

HLTH 2022 has come and gone and the technologies out there promise great things from healthcare in the future, but these technologies take time to mature and prove there efficacy. While there is hope for the future, the specter of decreased valuations and funding looms over an industry poised for change. There is one thing has been clear these past few months, consolidation is continuing, the holiday sales season is in full swing for the healthcare industry. While a large merger, or smaller consolidation may be an early holiday present for executives and investors, it creates challenges and headaches for IT teams and clinical staff. Tylenol certainly won’t help cure these woes.

Migrating different EHR systems is probably the largest hurdle, but there are also systems for pharmacy and radiology that can create a nightmare for IT teams that are already taxed maintaining existing systems. The additional burden can be overwhelming and cause systems to grind to a halt.

For clinical staff focused on seeing patients and taking care of their needs, the disruption to smooth operations can likewise be overwhelming. Did all the information transfer over? Has a patient’s medication allergy been missed? Has an existing medication been missed that could interact with a new one? These are concerns that need to addressed to put the clinical staff’s mind at ease and ensure that they can provide the best possible care to the patient’s.

Beyond patient safety concerns, there are also productivity concerns. Ineffective integration can lead to slowdowns in clinics, creating long wait times and dissatisfaction among staff and the patients who are waiting to be seen. Missing radiology reports, delays in diagnostic testing, lab results not showing, and prescriptions not getting routed properly are just some of the problems that can arise without proper integration and testing of systems.

Clinical staff are not IT experts and likely have little idea of what happens behind the scenes to ensure the smooth flow of information and data that enable safe and effective care. The clinical teams just want systems that work. When systems fail clinical staff safety can be compromised, staff frustration will grow as they resort to work-arounds. Most clinical staff have experienced this when EHRs and other systems were first rolled out, they are often jaded by these experiences that were disruptive and disconnected.

How do you ensure that transition to a new EHR will populate the data where it is expected? Will there be conflicting patient information? Will the images be migrated over to the right patient? Will prescriptions be sent to the pharmacy?

There is no end to the questions from clinicians about how it will work and what the experience will be after. How prepared are the teams behind the scenes to enable this migration? Do IT teams have the experience necessary to carry out this operation in an efficient and effective manner, after all, it’s not something they do every day.

There are many stresses associated with mergers and consolidation, IT systems should not be one of them. Tido Inc. can help handle these questions and work with IT teams to enable efficient and effective systems integration and migration. Check out Tido’s integration and migration packages.

Winter is coming…

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Birds migrate south for better climates.  Is it time to start re-evaluating your EHR climate?

Well known among clinicians are the challenges with many EHR systems, troubling user interfaces, difficulty navigating screens, and the number of mouse clicks required for even the most mundane tasks. As different EHR systems improve and provide more user-friendly interfaces, the challenges associated with choosing the best system for patient care should not be insurmountable.

Staff have finally gotten used to the existing system, so why change? Just because the current system is what everyone is used to, does not necessarily mean it is the best choice.

Health systems and physician practices have more choices than ever for EHR systems. Cloud based systems allow great flexibility and decreased infrastructure costs, traditional licensed software systems can offer more customized security and storage options. Practices may outgrow one EHR and have a need to move on to a new one, maybe the price has become prohibitive, maybe the nature of the practice itself has changed. The reasons for changing the EHR can be numerous.

Physicians, nurses, techs, and whole practices have likely spent countless hours customizing interfaces, connecting numerous devices and apps, and reducing their reliance on fax machines. Choosing a new EHR, for whatever reason, should not be a step backwards.

How do you choose a new EHR to begin with?

How do you handle the data migration?

What about all the existing patient data?

What about all the clinical workflows?

Where do you even start?!

Larger health systems may have an army of IT specialists at their disposal to help answer these questions, but even for large systems a migration of this size is a challenge. Are there the right people in place to begin with? What does the current infrastructure look like, can it even support a new system? For smaller hospitals or independent practices all these questions can seem overwhelming.

In 2016 the ONC published a guide to selecting EHR vendors, while published six years ago, the information is still relevant. For clinical and patient care staff one of the most important questions to be answered is whether or not the patient’s information will be present on day one. All patient data and information should be readily available to provide the continuity of care that everyone expects. All equipment used to enable patient care should be connected and functioning from day one.

Anyone who has been through systems and EHR implementations in healthcare is likely aware of the challenges and pain points that can occur. No matter how much training and testing has been completed, on day one, there will be questions and something will be missed. Clinical staff want systems that just work, and if something is broken, they want it fixed quickly so they can focus on their patients.

If you’ve experienced the challenge of implementing an EHR system, the thought of migrating to a new one might give you nightmares. Don’t let data migration, testing, and support be a barrier to implementing the best system for clinical staff and patients. Tido Inc. can help answer many of these questions with advisory services and assist with EHR migration and post go-live support.