The United Cerebral Palsy of Greater Birmingham (UCPGB) has recently moved to a new LINCPoint facility and identified the relocation as an opportune time to develop an electronic medical record keeping system. The UCPGB is a not-for-profit organization that provides various clinical health services to patients that have been diagnosed with Cerebral Palsy within the population of Birmingham, Alabama and reaches to the ten surrounding counties. The UCPGB is funded by a mixture of private and public funding, with most of its funding coming from the community through a parent organization, The United Way of Central Alabama. It is committed to providing a wide variety of services on site that…show more content… Evaluate and plan for ongoing system maintenance This new technology push will create a need for IT personnel. Trained professionals will need to be on staff to handle VISTA software updates, prevent software and hardware downtime and provide training to providers. Such an EMR will decrease the need for medical records staff. Resources from medical records can be transferred to a small IT department. In order to assure that UCPGB’s EMR is interoperable with other providers, they must first recognize the needs of the community and determine if there is even an interest for wide range usage. Once interest has been recognized, the hardware can be negotiated as a whole for the community and margining can be encouraged for detailed training and support. Such a community wide inter-related system would allow for easier referral services and ultimately improve patient care. Upon selecting an EMR system for UCPGB several factors were considered. The priority criteria “adequate functionality to meet user needs at an affordable price” was met, among the other critical need for the new EMR system to be flexible enough- or customizable enough to incorporate a group of multi-specialists. Because UCPGB is a multi-specialist group consisting of doctors with various practice specialties, thus the EMR must be able to accommodate all of these sub-specialties. The VistA system which was chosen, tackled most, if not all of the major obstacles
