The EHR Implementation Go-Live Series
Are you ‘Ready’ to Go-Live? In this blog post we discuss 5 key questions to ask prior to Go-Live.
It all starts with a great plan. Accessing readiness is the most critical factor to consider during planning. This partnership will affect all other decisions that are made from this point forward.
Key Questions for Go-Live Readiness:
1) How many users will you have? And where will they be
Accurately assessing the number of users you will have and their accessibility to at-the-elbow support during Go-Live is vital in determining the outcome of your overall plan.
Identify your needs based on ratios and models that are compatible with vendor standards. Design a justifiable support ratio for every site across your organization by walking it, recording volumes and staffing levels by modality.
For example, the vendor-recommended support ratio may call for four support professionals to cover a department with 12 users. But you may need five professionals if those users are dispersed across a sprawling space, thus making it difficult to for your at-the-elbow support resources to stay close to each user.
Or, you may know that you have 100 employees in your radiology department. But did you account for the fact that you are adding 30 users spread across 10 rooms?
Similarly, your IT leadership may not know that part of another department is undergoing construction, and that you will have 25 rooms for it at Go-Live instead of 15 rooms as you do now. Uncovering small departments hidden inside a clinic or identifying needs for staff who require limited support can be large contributors to your Go-Live’s success.
2) How proficient are your users?
Numbers alone do not account for how adept your users are at learning new technologies. Identify what internal resources you currently have trained and committed to work in each department. Know what classes your resources have taken to identify exactly where your support gaps exist by department.
Your initial assessment may be that you need three support professionals for a department with nine users, based purely on recommended support ratios. However, if most of the department’s members are experienced technology users then you may be able to reduce their support team to two professionals.
If you can trim the department’s support team, you could assign one of the previously allocated at-the-elbow resources to a unit that could use additional help. You could also pocket the savings of reducing your support team without compromising training. Or, you could maintain the original support team of three at-the-elbow resources, allowing them to collectively give more time to users who are not as adept with technology.
When formulating your response to these key questions, focus on data elements, recording facts as they are, not as you wish they would be, and apply the following principles.
3) Consider the “facts.”
Compile numbers objectively, without accounting for how they may affect your budget or whether they will please upper management. Or, demand that your Go-Live consultants do so. You can inform leadership of the need as you perceive it based on your analysis, but it is ultimately up to them to determine the size of the support team.
4) Budget conservatively
Some hospitals have disbursed practically unlimited budgets so that their team does not lack for assistance at Go-Live, perhaps hoping to overwhelm physicians in particular so that they do not complain. Other facilities have literally not provided any budget at all, essentially leaving clinicians and non-clinicians to learn among the challenges that inevitably arise during Go-Live, like printer issues. Optimally, you should fall in between, by providing enough support professionals to speed adoption and accelerate learning—without blowing out your budget.
5) Be inclusive.
Do not rely on any one party to set your staffing levels. Include your internal team, EHR vendor and any other third-party participants in your planning to ensure that you account for all perspectives. Your vendors know their products, your consultants bring best practices and your internal team knows the inner workings of your organization. Together, they can provide the most complete picture and comprehensive solution.Properly assessing your readiness for Go-Live from the onset will help make your eventual Go-Live successful, thus ensuring that your hard work does indeed pay off.