Creation and management of an effective electronic health record (EHR) implementation team is a crucial process. Once you have identified potential members of the implementation team, follow these guiding principles to ensure EHR stakeholder involvement as you create and maintain your team.

• Engage all of the staff: Identify staff or ask for volunteers and try to have team members handle tasks that they have expressed interest in working on.
• Identify roles and responsibilities: Set the expectations for the team members, and clarify how team members will relate to each other. For an overview of roles stakeholders may play, see “Who are the key stakeholders when implementing an EHR?”
• Set aside non-patient-care time to meet: The staff’s top priority should be patient care, so it is important to be respectful of patients and meet outside of patient-care time.
• Demonstrate commitment to providing staff with adequate time: Allow time during normal operating hours for staff to attend to EHR implementation tasks, as a way of showing respect for their work-life balance.
• Acknowledge extra effort and celebrate milestones: Be sure to let team members know that they are doing an important job in transitioning the office into a more effective practice that will eventually free them up to focus more of their work time on patients. Provide rewards for achieving key milestones.
• Acknowledge that the staff holds the answers: The key to sound implementation with minimal disruption of workflow is EHR stakeholder involvement and acknowledgment that the staff knows best how changes will affect productivity, and that they are best positioned to answer questions about effective EHR adoption.
• Support the desire to achieve success: Be sure that the staff understands the benefits that can be achieved if they are successful. Point out how different areas of the practice (front desk, medical records, phone nurse, referral employees, billing, etc.) will specifically receive benefits from the EHR.
• Keep eyes on the prize: Help the team stay focused on the task at hand, and avoid pitfalls or tangents in the process that can set back the implementation effort.
• Celebrate success: Be sure to celebrate success – both major and minor achievements – to keep the project team and stakeholders engaged and motivated throughout the entire process.