Timeline of Custom EHR Development?

Let me provide you some stats that might give you an idea about the exclusive benefits of EHR systems and how it impacts your care delivery and practice management.

1. 45% of patients reported quality of care after the adoption of EHR by their primary practice.

2. 60% of American adults suffering from chronic illnesses reported better ongoing treatment.

3. Reduction in medical errors due to EHR is saving as much as 30% on average of the $20 billion cost each year.

You see, from cost saving to improving the quality of care in primary care delivery and chronic disease management, EHR have somewhere become the epicenter of modern-day healthcare offerings. But these are just the clinical aspects of the EHR system. The benefits it provides in practice management is something that comes as a complimentary.

However, depending on the nature of your practice, the specific clinical workflow you follow, and the intricacies that underlie your practice, a generic or off-the-shelf EHR software is proving to be an ineffective solution. That is the reason you see many healthcare providers like yourself shifting to an EHR development approach.

This customized development is not just limited to EHR systems, but a surge in custom healthcare software development is also observed. Since they aim to meet the specific needs of the practice, have better adherence rate and integration scope, this naturally becomes a preferred choice for healthcare practices.

However, unlike off-the-shelf EHR software, developing EHR systems from scratch is a lengthy and long process. But why is this? Well, let’s see the typical timeline of a tailored EHR solution for healthcare and what are the factors that influence the development cycle.

So, without further ado, let’s get started.

Initial Consultation and Requirement Gathering – 2-3 Weeks

The journey starts with initial consultation that revolves around the electronic health record development. The first thing that is done here is defining the scope of the software. Meaning the EMR software developers and healthcare professionals sit down to understand the painpoints of the practice, define the specific features, functionalities and problem-solving ability of the software with specification

Once the scope of the EHR software is completed, here are the two most important things that you do to ensure that the software meets all the requirements and is able to help its users.

1. Stakeholders Interviews: To ensure no leaf is left unturned, all the needs and requirements of the stakeholders are taken into consideration. Generally, these stakeholders involve the doctors, nurses, admins, and staff members of your practice. This is important because these are the people who will be actually using the custom EHR software.

2. Research and Compliance: The next step is to check the necessary compliance and research about the industry standards that are dominant in the healthcare industry. Compliances such as HIPAA, GDPR, etc., are necessary to build trust and help your practice to easily navigate through the legal landscape, whereas the research about the standard practice is necessary to ensure you are relevant and up to date with the industry trends, etc.

Design & Prototyping – 4-5 Weeks

In the previous stage, you basically gathered everything that you required for your custom EHR software development. Once you have everything the actual EHR system development process starts. The very first step in this involves designing the software and creating its prototypes to test if the software design works or not.

Here are some of the crucial aspects of the design and prototyping stage that you must consider and will take up almost four to five weeks of your and development team’s time.

1. Wireframes and Mockups: The success of your custom EHR software directly depends on the ease the user has while interacting and using the software. That is why user interface and user experience, better known as UI/UX, are given special attention. Here, the software design team creates wireframes and mockups of the UI/UX to give you an idea of how the software will look and feel while interacting with them.

2. User Feedback: After the wireframes and mockups are created, they are then given to a set of users to test and gain their feedback. Since they are the end-users of your software, their feedback will help you in making the software more user-friendly, and the design will be based on real-world use cases.

3. High-fidelity Prototypes: After refining the software design, high-fidelity prototypes of the software, which resemble the final look, feel, and functionality of the software, are created. This is to test the design in a real-world scenario before moving for development. If the prototype fails, the entire process is repeated to ensure that the software is easy to use and aligns perfectly with the clinical and administrative needs of the software.

Development & Coding – 3-4 Months

Soon after the design of the software is finalized, the software enters the most important and the longest phase of the EHR software project timeline which is development and coding. This is a technical part of the development, EHR development lifecycle management best practices must be implemented to ensure the software is on the right development path.

Here is a quick breakdown of the EHR software project timeline that is involved in this process:

1. Backend Development: In the healthcare IT systems development process, you need to outline the process of coding the backend. Here, everything that happens behind the screen, like data storage, security aspects of the software, and integration of the software with lab systems, billing software, etc, is coded. With backend development, the actual functioning and functionality of the software are decided and achieved.

2. Frontend Development: Once the backend of the software is developed, the frontend of the software is also developed. Here, the interface of the software is built and ensured that it is intuitive and interactive for the users. The goal that is aimed to achieve in this is to ensure it is easy for healthcare professionals to use the software.

3. Integration and Customization: While the front end and back end of the software can be achieved fairly quickly, the most time-consuming process in the development phase is the integration and customization phase. Depending on the complexity of integration with third-party systems, legacy software, and unique prepositions of practice, the EHR software project timeline is directly impacted. Given the collaborative nature of healthcare delivery, integration and customization of the custom medical record software development must not be taken lightly.

Testing and Quality Assurance (QA) – 1-2 Months

With coding and integration, the custom EHR software development is completed, and now it enters the testing phase, where the software is tested for its functionality and optimum usage. This is done for the quality assurance of the software and several types of tests are conducted on the software.

Here are some of the intricacies in this stage that you must know, which have a direct impact on the quality and healthcare software development timeline:

1. Unit and Integration Testing: In this type of testing, all the individual components of the software features are tested. Along with that, with unit testing, you can also ensure that all the parts of the software are integrated properly and working in synchrony.

2. Usability Testing: In usability testing, the software’s credibility is tested with actual users. This is to ensure that the software functions optimally and is intuitive in nature. Along with that, one of the major use cases of usability testing is to check whether all the goals and objectives of the software are met.

3. Security and Compliance Testing: Security and compliance testing are two of the most important cornerstones of your custom EHR software development. Security and compliance testing must be conducted to secure your software. Here, the encryptions of the software are tested along with the role-based access control functionality to ensure the software is secure for deployment and usage. Furthermore, to avoid any legal troubles in the future, compliance checks are conducted as per the rules and regulations put forth by regulatory bodies such as HIPAA, GDPR, HITECH Act, etc.

Deployment & User Training – 2-4 Weeks

After the software passes all the testing and quality assurance checks, your custom medical record software development enters its last phase, which is the deployment and user training phase. Though it is one of the quickest phases in the EHR system development process, here are some of the aspects that can impact the entire healthcare software development timeline:

1. System Deployment: During the system deployment process, the most time-consuming aspect is data migration. Here, the data is extracted, transformed, and loaded into the new system. After the data aligns perfectly with the workflow and preferences of the system, the system becomes ready to go live.

2. Training and Onboarding: The credibility of the software purely depends on its usability. And with training and onboarding, you ensure the smooth adoption of the software by its core users, which are the clinicians, administrative staff, and other stakeholders.

3. Support and Feedback: Immediately after the launch of the software, your healthcare IT company’s EHR software customization services kick in. This is in the form of providing support, which is crucial for the software to align with the workflow and the clinical practices. Along with that, crucial feedback from the users is collected for immediate or future improvements and updates to the software.

Ongoing Maintenance and Updates – Continuous Process

With the deployment of your customizable EHR, the EHR system development process is complete. However, it enters the next phase, which is ongoing maintenance and providing updates. This is a continuous process and usually lasts till the software is in use. Here are the crucial aspects of this phase that you must know:

1. Bug Fixes and Patches: The software deals with a variety of data from different sources on a daily basis. That is why you should outline a plan to maintain the performance of the software by addressing the bugs and fixing them. Along with that, patches must also be made to address some gaps in the software functionality, security, etc. In this way, you not only ensure the software is performing optimally but also better than it was.

2. Feature Enhancements: Custom EHR development for healthcare providers will probably require changes with advancements in technology. That is why you should implement a feedback mechanism to collect user feedback and implement it in your software to stay updated with the evolving healthcare regulations.

3. Security Audits: While dealing with data from different sources, there is a chance that some data might compromise the security of the software. Along with that, the ever-changing nature of the digital healthcare landscape also impacts the security and compliance of your software. To ensure the integrity and security of your custom EHR software, you must conduct security audits on a regular basis. This way, you can identify any gaps in the security and address them in real time.

Frequently Asked Questions