Whichever you decide, it's a good idea to understand the scope of your specific project. Are you operating a small practice at one single location? If so, you may be able to keep a hard deadline for making the change to EMR, and live to tell the tale. However, this would be a system shock to most busy practices who maintain that EMR isn't ready for prime time.

Plan your roll-out with a series of milestones focused on sub-sets of patients: for example, begin with new patients. As search milestone is reached successfully, the minor problems should all be addressed and resolved. Only then should you proceed to the next milestone; for example, adding another patient sub-set.

Before reaching the date to go live, be sure to review the post-mortem from your simulation; this will be helpful for guiding major issues which you've identified during the simulation, and repair the problems which are critical for your go live launch date. For example, having an insufficient amount of bandwidth, training issues, bad network equipment, or a template that doesn't cut it all will affect work flow at your clinic.

When the go live date nears, be sure your IT staff is present and ready through the switch-over. If you don't have your own information technology person then hire contractors - either from a recommendation by the software vendor, or a local provider. The contractor should be involved from the beginning of the project; don't just call on them for the date of the switch-over.

Important office and clinical staff should be requested not to take a vacation on that day; the ideal situation is to have as many doctors as possible there as well. It's very likely that some staff will have requested this time before the go live date is known, so some exceptions should be made.

Issues with training should also be considered. Our Information Technology staff generated a great slogans, 'when in doubt, right click to check it out,' along with 'you must hover to discover,' and 'select it to affect it.' These mnemonics help staff remember important points of using the EMR system. Regardless of thorough training, the stress of treating live patients can cause even a strong computer use to forget how to perform simple actions.

Our EMR system launch was first used specifically with new patients who needed to complete an examination. Existing patients weren't entered initially, so we could rollout our system gradually.

When the rollout date arrived, the most exciting thing that occurred was - nothing. No computer melt-downs or waiting room riots. A success. There were some little problems, but nothing major. The EMR templates definitely needed some tweaking, as this is a continual process. However, we can confidently attribute our relatively smooth EMR launch to the months spent training and planning in advance.

By the way, do you want to learn more about implementing EMR in your own practice? Download my free report "Getting Through The EMR Maze."