HIM 615 EHR interview questions: a planning guide

The task is small and the framing is long, which is a signal about what is being assessed. You are asked what questions you should pose to get the answers the Module 6 assignment requires. Most of the prompt is spent on one instruction: the professional you are interviewing is busy, so keep the questions clear and concise and limit them to the fewest possible. That is not politeness advice, it is the constraint the exercise turns on. Anyone can produce twenty questions about electronic health records. Producing six that between them yield everything the assignment needs is a design problem, and designing under a limit is the skill this discussion is testing. Say the number out loud in your post — six questions, or eight — because committing to a count forces the editing that the prompt is asking for, and a post that presents an unbounded list has quietly declined the exercise.

So work backwards. Before drafting anything, write down what the Module 6 assignment actually asks you to produce, then list the facts you will need to produce it, and only then write questions that obtain those facts. Every question should map to something on that list. If a draft question does not, cut it — it is curiosity rather than requirement. This backwards method also protects you from the most common failure on this exercise, which is a set of questions that would produce an interesting conversation and an unwritable assignment. It is worth writing the mapping down in the post itself: this question yields that section. A marker can see immediately whether the set is complete, and so can you. Where two draft questions map to the same requirement, one of them is redundant and cutting it is exactly the discipline the prompt is asking for.

Distinguish carefully between what you can look up and what only this person can tell you. Which certified product the organisation uses, what the certification criteria are, what the vendor claims the module does — all of that is public, and asking about it spends a busy professional's time on something a search would have answered. What the interview is uniquely for is experience: what the selection process actually weighed, which promised capability did not survive contact with the workflow, what staff work around and why, what the organisation would do differently. Reserve your limited questions for the things that exist only in this person's head. The prompt hints at this when it distinguishes the questions you need from the less critical conversation about their job that may follow if time allows; the first is the assignment, the second is a bonus you should not plan for. Doing the background reading first also changes how you are received: an interviewee who can tell you have prepared answers more openly than one fielding questions from a blank page.

Question form matters more than most students expect. Open questions of the form "walk me through how..." produce narrative you can analyse; closed questions produce facts you could have obtained elsewhere. Avoid double-barrelled questions, which look efficient and are not — the interviewee answers one half and the other is quietly lost. Avoid leading questions, which get you agreement rather than information. And plan one or two follow-up probes rather than more questions: "what happened then?" and "can you give me an example?" will get you further than a fresh topic, because the value is usually one layer below the first answer. Watch your vocabulary too: a question that assumes the interviewee shares your coursework's terminology may be answered from a different definition, and neither of you will notice. Ask about the thing rather than the label — how a particular report gets produced, rather than whether the system supports analytics.

A short sequence works better than a flat list, and saying why demonstrates that you thought about the interview rather than only the questions. Open with something easy and factual that establishes context and lets the interviewee settle. Put your most important question second or third, while attention is high and time is not yet a worry. Group related questions so the interviewee is not asked to switch topics repeatedly. Close by asking what you did not think to ask, which is the highest-yield question in any professional interview and costs one line. Say how long you will take and then take less; an interview that ends early leaves the door open for the follow-up you will probably need once you start writing.

The research literature gives you something worth building a question around. Reviews of EHR implementation identify recurring gaps in workflow analysis, customisation decisions and training, and a scoping review of professional involvement in EHR development found that clinicians were typically consulted only once in the whole process. Both findings suggest a question most students will not ask: not whether staff were involved, but at what points and how often, and what changed as a result. Since the course rules require at least 250 words and a scholarly source in the initial post, that is also where your citation naturally belongs — supporting the design of the question rather than being appended to the end of the list. That is also what makes the post substantive in the sense the participation rules mean: you are not only listing questions, you are giving a reason a classmate could adopt or dispute.