A New Era Begins: Electronic Health Records (EHR)

In order to continue to excel at serving the individuals, families, and communities who count on Riverside, we are working rapidly to enhance our ability to communicate among our staff and programs in real time. We are also working to reduce administrative burdens so that our employees have accurate information and an easy way to add and review information and reduce duplication when documenting services and billing. The effort to bring us into a new era began a few years back, including enhancing our IT systems, and more recently with the hiring of a dedicated project manager to help select and implement an electronic health record or EHR.

At the end of September, a large team of our staff representing services across the entire organization, helped to choose an EHR from among many good companies that specialize in community-based healthcare and human services. While we were moving through the selection process, we were working on addressing hardware and software needs, gaining access to federal funding, and beginning to design the system based on our specific needs.

It will be several years for us to fully implement the new system (Netsmart’s Evolv product). Evolv will allow for real time, secure record updates across the organization, will collect key data for us, and will handle all of our insurance billing needs. We are clear that this will mean better care for the people we serve and less administrative work for our employees. Thank you in particular to Carolyn Petze who has handled the role of Project Manager with good cheer and a lot of skill and Ed Follen our VP/CFO who has worked with Carolyn every step of the way.

~Scott M. Bock, President/CEO