Most hospitals have got quite a ways to go to achieve the stage 3 (nee 2015) goals for meaningful use, but most are on the right track.

According to the latest HIMSS Analytics data, 84 percent of American hospitals have at least got the foundation clinical data repository (CDR) implemented and are building a data store of electronic patient care information.

We’ll see how many of them can build on their CDR, adding not only nursing and physician documentation, but computerized practitioner order entry, clinical decision support and data warehousing and business intelligence tools to capture the data and be able to report and act on it. As big a task as that is, it’s not my major concern; I think the vast majority of healthcare organizations will get the tools in place to be able to generate the data and achieve the criteria to meet the HITECH regulations.

My major concern is how many healthcare organizations are going stuff it up, as the Aussies would say. How many will slam in the systems and have unrealistic expectations that their front-line clinicians are actually going to fully use them? Are they simply going to automate the existing inefficient, work-around plagued workflows? Are they going to address the corporate culture issues that will inevitably arise from such an attempt to transform the organization? Are the right people going to be held accountable for achieving value in the investment? Are they going to treat it like an IT project rather than a business initiative with an IT component? Are they going to hammer the CIO if things don’t work out?

I don’t think many hospitals understand that they’ve got a lot of work to do on the people side of an EMR implementation. Simply installing systems, training end-users right before go-live to survive in the new environment, and expecting that you’re going to be successful in achieving meaningful use, much less getting value from your investment, isn’t going to be sufficient.

Electronic medical record (EMR) deployments are not about technology. They are about equipping organizations to reach critical business objectives by providing people with IT-enabled capabilities that make new things possible. They’re also about engaging people in changing their behavior to effectively use the new capabilities to generate results.

That’s a whole different set of tasks than just doing a system implementation and it requires a different set of skills and experience.

The people who have those skills and experience doing the change management pieces of EMR implementations are the rarest of the rare commodities in the industry right now.

So my concern is really two-fold. First, I don’t think most hospital management teams, including some of the CIOs, fully understand what they’re getting into when they undertake to change everything for the clinicians in the organization by moving to an EMR environment. And second, there aren’t enough qualified change management professionals out there to help them even if they recognized the need, and had the budget, to ask for the help.

We’ve got a unique opportunity to get this right and get some help funding it. May we all do the right stuff!

Dave Garets is president and CEO of HIMSS Analytics and the contributing editor of a new HIMSS-published book entitled “Change Management Strategies for an Effective EMR Implementation,” authored by Claire McCarthy and Douglas Eastman.