We’re listening: How your feedback helps us build a better EHR experience

At Practice Fusion, we’re passionate about designing and building better experiences in the EHR for your practice and your patients, obtaining customer feedback is a critical part of that process. You and your patients are the authorities on the EHR and patient portal—you know what you need to accomplish, and you want to do it quickly, efficiently, and easily throughout your day.

When you share your thoughts with us through a phone call, an email, a research interview, or a survey, your input, ideas and concerns are listened to by teams across Practice Fusion who are eager to make a positive difference in your EHR experience. 

So, what happens to all that great feedback? Well, let’s take a tour through our newly revamped customer feedback process and share some real-life examples of recent feature improvements. 

Customer Feedback Process

Step 1: We keep our ears to the ground

The obvious first step in a good feedback loop is to listen. Maybe you’ve reached out to the Customer Success team to report a problem or share an idea. Perhaps you’ve responded to a survey or been part of a research interview to provide feedback about a feature. We are listening to what you have to say through our communication channels, and share it across our teams so we can better understand what problems you’re facing and how we can help. 

Step 2: We organize and prioritize

As we listen, we organize the threads of feedback and build a clear picture of what’s being requested. We prioritize the feedback based on its overall value to you and your patients along with the level of effort required to solve the problem or make the improvement. Finally, we look for ways to make those changes a reality.

Step 3: We design, build & deliver

Our Design and Customer Insights team works closely with our customer, product management, and engineering teams to design a solution to the problem at hand. Sometimes, the solution is straightforward and simple, but other times, the design is more complex and requires user research to make sure we’re on the right track. Once we’ve designed and tested the solution, our engineers get to work on building it, and our education and marketing teams work on ensuring that you know about the change and know how it impacts you. To learn more about our user-centered design practice, read our recent blog post.

We’ve made some changes thanks to your feedback 

Here are some examples of recent changes we’ve made to the EHR - large and small - thanks to great feedback from our customers. 

Document Management

Problem: For many years, we have heard from our customers how challenging it is to manage documents in the EHR. Moving faxed documents to a patient’s chart is an arduous task that requires many steps and headache. Improving this feature was the number one request in our 2020 Customer Satisfaction Survey. 

Solution: We engaged customers in several research studies to better understand the problems they face in this workflow. We uncovered a wide range of issues from the number of files you can upload at one time to the desire to be able to scan documents directly into the EHR. Our team worked to define, prioritize, and evaluate all research recommendations. The result is a phased approach to improving the feature over the next year. 

The first phase was delivered in December 2020 and included improvements such as: 

Learn more about our document management improvements

Our vision for document management is to help your practice get documents in and out of the EHR in as few steps as possible. Over the course of the next year, we’ll be bringing you more document tools to support a vision of creating a one-stop-shop for documents in the EHR. 

Patient profile notes field

Problem: The Profile Notes section of a patient’s chart is a popular and widely used field. During user research calls, we consistently heard how frustrating it was that the field only had a 500-character limit. This wasn’t nearly enough space to use the section properly. 

Solution: We increased the limit of the Profile Notes field to 2000 characters. This required some changes to the database and to the field that you see in the EHR. Now, you can add more information to that section with ease.  

COVID resources in the EHR

Practice Fusion has endeavored to adapt to the changing needs of our customers as practices have navigated through the COVID pandemic.

Beginning in January of 2020, we added canonical resources from the CDC so you would have the latest information at your fingertips in the EHR. As more guidelines became available, we added symptom-based alerts and shortcuts to COVID diagnoses. 

Most critically, as your practices began transitioning to telehealth visits, we partnered with Updox to bring you a video visit solution that would make it easier for providers to see patients remotely. We are looking to enhance telehealth integrations in 2021 as online visits become a more permanent fixture in your practice. 

As we move into the vaccination phase, both the Pfizer and the Moderna COVID vaccines are now available in the EHR. We will continue to review guidance from the CDC and add additional vaccines as they become available.

We will keep listening for your feedback and evolving our plans for improvements. Stay tuned for more updates on how your customer feedback is shaping a better EHR!