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.

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.)

With the rise in focus on population health by large health systems and hospitals, many executives and stakeholders are left scratching their heads to understand why the epic (no pun intended) investment in their EHR isn’t getting the job done. The reality is that most EHR systems were designed for the Fee-For-Service days, and there simply aren’t quick enough adaptations in those technologies to address the vital importance of tracking patient outcomes, not just codes. We’ve seen clients point to their behemoth health records system as the solution to a myriad of patient management problems, but it takes a comprehensive approach to healthcare technology to leverage (not lean on) an established EHR to make population health management possible.

We recently shared how important it is to engage the right resources for an EHR implementation for a health system or hospital. What precludes this process at times is identifying the “weak links” on the team who are holding up progress. Gross malalignments of talent and tasks are pretty easy to spot, but some of what we’ll share today are the more subtle ways that you can detect where there are barriers to progress on implementing EHR systems, or healthcare technology in general for your organization or clients. Because timelines are real and budgets are locked in, you simply can’t afford to press forward with logjams or, worse, balls dropped by ill-equipped or poorly-motivated resources.