In our most recent video, HCI Chief Operating Officer, Mike Sinno, identifies three strategies for maximizing your support program during an Epic Go-Live. A quick summary of the points is provided below—be sure to watch the video for a complete overview of how to evaluate your current Super Users, identify potential gaps in support, and subsequently augment your Super User Program and reinforce training.
1. Start with Your Epic Super Users
Before taking steps to establish your Epic Support Team, you should take a look at your existing support resources on the clinical and business teams. Once you have an accurate assessment of these areas, you’ll have a good idea of your ability to tap into these existing resources for support during the Epic go-live and post go-live.
2. Identify Your Gaps ahead of the Epic Go-Live
Now that you’ve established your current support capabilities, you’ll be able to accurately identify your organizational gaps. Whether or not they’ve had prior experience with an EHR, many of your clinicians and support staff will be new to Epic. Even for those who have had prior experience with Epic, this will be an entirely new implementation with new, organizationally-specific challenges. As such, you need to make the most of their Epic EMR training and have at-the-elbow (ATE) resources available to reinforce classroom training during cutover.
3. Augment Your Super User Program & Reinforce Epic Training
To ensure adequate support bandwidth during cutover, you’ll need to fill in the gaps by augmenting your internal Super User Program with external support resources. Because this will be a large workforce that is deployed for a short amount of time, organizations do not typically assemble their own external support program. Considering the logistics and planning that will come into play during an already high-pressure situation, the experience of a partner firm can provide invaluable expertise and peace of mind.
You can expect that you’ll need the supplemental workforce for about a two-week period. If you have physicians frequently practicing in an ambulatory location, you may need to retain external support for up to four weeks. In such instances, the goal is to return to pre-EHR productivity levels by the end of week four.
You may also be interested in:
- Go-Live "Best" Practices to Avoid
- Epic Service Desk – Why Analytics Hold The Key
- eBook: The Definitive EHR Go-Live Guide
