How to Select EMR and Billing Systems

Electronic Medical Record (EMR) and billing systems offer substantial clinical care, financial, practice workflow, and compliance benefits to doctors, insurance companies, and patients. However, half of medical practices that purchase EMR software fail to successfully implement it.

EMR products can be roughly divided into two categories along architecture dimension: web-based Application Service Provider (ASP) solutions and Client Server (CS)-based technologies. Upon briefly reviewing key factors defining each technology, we compare them along two criteria, namely, implementation success likelihood and costs.