Your team has worked tirelessly towards achieving HIMSS EMRAM Stage 7, but how do you know if you’re survey ready? From reviewing the experience of our customers, HCI has found 3 key factors in preparing for the survey visit.
Mock Surveys
The importance of mock surveys was discussed in 5 Must Have Tools for Achieving EMRAM Stage 7 as a measure of progress, and the same applies when you’re near the end of your journey. Mock surveys will give you validation, and identify any last-minute weaknesses you need to address before your survey visit.
Setting a Date
You think your organization is very close to being survey ready? Set the date. When you set the date for your survey, it becomes a deadline for your organization to push through its final steps. After a potentially long process, this gives the signal to your team that it’s happening, and no one wants to fail after the hard work and time put into this type of process. Moreover, in large organizations, no one wants to be the one department/campus that did not make it happen. In a recent webinar, we held on Achieving EMRAM Stage 7, we learned that once a date was set for a survey, it got the energy moving throughout the organization: people were refining scorecards, reporting out and being held accountable - all of which pushed organizations over the finish line.
Leadership
Throughout HCI’s series of blog posts on Achieving EMRAM Stage 7, leadership has come up repeatedly, and that’s because it is the key ingredient. IT leadership alone cannot get your entire organization through to a point where it’s survey ready, it’s the clinical and executive leadership that must also be aligned. Start early on, after your system go-live, strengthen the IT team’s relationships with your organization's quality management team, operations team and clinical leadership. Show them how effective use of the system will benefit patient care and you should see your priorities align.
If you can align your priorities with leaders across the organization early, it will help get key stakeholders on your side to roll out those final steps across the organization. Albeit difficult and time consuming to create these relationships and alignments, the investment is nothing compared to the reward of having the whole organization aligned before survey day. Once the whole organization is aligned, you are survey ready.
Additional Resources:
- Check out this webinar to learn how Lancaster General Health approached organization-wide engagement in pursuing HIMSS Analytics Stage 7 hospital and ambulatory awards, including specific processes to focus for site preparation and the official evaluation visit.
- The HIMSS Analytics EMRAM site visit is the culmination of the many hours spent preparing to get your organization to stage 7. This HIMSS EMRAM blog post addresses 4 key questions about your site visit presentation.
- Click here for more: HIMSS EMRAM Consulting Services information
Schedule Time to Speak with Our HIMSS Analytics EMRAM Team by Contacting Us Below.