Ed Marx, Chief Digital Officer at The HCI Group gives his account on how our organization has quickly adapted to the changing dynamic that the Coronavirus pandemic has brought to the workforce...

"As social distancing and working from home become the norm, many companies struggle to respond. There are feelings of helplessness. Anxiety rises. We grapple with management control and routine communications. Unprepared, we are challenged to deploy secure collaboration capabilities. We lack the ability to flex capacity and respond quickly to emerging business demands. I get it. Been there, learned the hard way and I have a couple of ideas...

Ken Bradberry of The HCI Group shares his thoughts on the COVID-19 pandemic and how healthcare providers can best prepare and plan to maintain service:

Disaster planning is a critical responsibility in the delivery of IT services for our healthcare providers and at HCI. Disasters on a massive scale can severely disrupt the delivery of healthcare services. Unlike the immediate impact of a fire or a weather event, as we have observed with the current COVID-19 situation, a pandemic can develop gradually over a period of weeks or months depending on the spread of the illness. The economic consequences of a major virus outbreak can be devastating. The current spread of the COVID-19 virus can create increased absentee rates, a realistic threat as this virus runs its course. As I write this article the local communities impacted, for example the entire State of Michigan and schools across the country are closed, impacting millions of parents and students due to the virus. In order to control the infection rates, critical resources may be out of commission for a period of time to recover, care for sick family members or just to watch the kids due to school closings.

The HCI Group was delighted to host the highly acclaimed Ed Marx in the first part of his webinar series on How to Enable Enterprise Digital Transformation. Marx has served as a CIO at some of the nation’s largest health systems and is now dedicating his time to help his fellow IT leaders on their digital journeys.

Epic’s ability to match other Telehealth vendors in functionality has allowed it to become exceedingly competitive in comprehensive telemedicine programs with 2017 and 2018 versions. It has brought additional functionality, such as wait rooms, on-demand visits, and much more.

As more payors begin to reimburse video visits and more patients come to expect this ease of access to providers, telemedicine programs are becoming more and more vital to the presence and success of large organizations within a wide geographical footprint.

Locked away in Chicago, Ed Marx races towards the final sprint to complete his latest publication, “Healthcare Digital Transformation”, a book he has co-authored with Paddy Padmanabhan set to release in May 2020. The HCI Group were pleased to be able to spend a few minutes with him to discuss his upcoming six-part webinar series ahead of its launch at the end of this month.

Relative to other sectors of the economy, healthcare has been slow to adopt digital. A decade spent in digitizing patient medical records with EHR system implementations has left many health systems unable or unwilling to invest in a new round of technology transformation initiatives.

HCI is looking forward to attending the 2019 CHIME CIO Fall Forum in Phoenix, AZ, Nov. 3-6. During Fall Forum, HCI will be participating in the Golf Reception & Tournament, leading focus groups and attending insightful sessions. Also, as a CHIME Global Partner, HCI will be attending the CHIME Healthcare's Most Wired celebrations.

The forum is a unique opportunity for CIOs and other healthcare IT executives to collaborate with colleagues, reciprocate best practices and discuss material about healthcare IT with fellow thought leaders and industry influencers.

When health systems decide to pull the trigger on a large-scale healthcare IT integration project, they will often try to keep as much core knowledge in-house as possible. Hiring consultants and vendors is not uncommon as well, but the ship is generally being driven by employed resources of the hospital. This isn’t a bad thing per se, but when it comes to certain aspects of delivering well-integrated healthcare systems and EHR implementation, it’s worth tapping into outside parties who can bolster the overall skill set on the project, and augment your team that may be underprepared for this kind of action. One such resource worth outsourcing for integration: Quality Assurance (“QA”).

While the planning involved in EHR implementation is extensive, it’s important that healthcare organizations stack the deck when it comes to roll-out. In our experience, hospitals and large practices can rarely afford a long period of solution overlap or clinical disruption, which is why a successful launch (and smooth landing) are clutch for mitigating extensive costs and slipped timelines. No matter how together a care delivery organization has it, opting for Go-Live support for NextGen EHR implementation is the insurance needed to push forward confidently and efficiently, allowing care providers and staff to focus on patients, not on technology.

There is an incredible amount of work that goes into an EHR implementation. With no shortage of tasks and milestones, delivering a healthcare IT solution (such as MEDITECH) to a large health organization is a feat that requires extensive coordination and effective communication. One of the most powerful tools to this end, especially at the tail end of the implementation phase (roll-out and adoption), is a dedicated communication channel for the MEDITECH Go-Live. Some circles refer to this as a “War Room,” and it may be prudent to invoke this kind of on-demand support in other phases of healthcare technology delivery as well. But especially when a large hospital is making a cut-over and has set a date for launching MEDITECH (be it from scratch or to support a hefty upgrade), it’s vital to get the right people in the same room should something go wrong. (Because it will.)