Tag Archives: EHR

User group meetings — learning from others (part 2)

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Last week, I wrote about the value of site visits as a way to learn from others. Fresh off the annual Epic User Group Meeting (UGM), I’ll call it a site visit on steroids. There are over 10,000 attendees, 100’s of educational sessions presented by users, direct access to Epic staff, and plenty of networking time; you see what I mean?

This was the first year it made sense to invite my executive colleagues from UMHS to attend. Our core Electronic Health Record is now in place, our executives need to look to the future: what else is possible with the product we already have, what new functionality is planned for future upgrades, and what other Epic users are doing.

Three UMHS executives answered my call and they were glad they did: the Hospitals and Health Centers CEO, and the executive directors of the children and women’s hospital and the adult hospital.  We will debrief as a group soon about what they saw and heard, and to explore what functionality we should prioritize next. Continue reading →

Site visits — learning from others

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What do NHS Trusts (hospitals in the UK), the Department of Defense Military Health System (MHS) and Brigham and Women’s Health Care (BWHC) have in common? They all think they can learn from our experience implementing an integrated electronic health record (EHR) at UMHS. We hosted a group from the UK in early July and hosted military leaders from MHS this week. And we are planning to host a team from BWHC in late October. The UK and MHS are in the planning and vendor selection phase while BWHC is less than a year away from their big bang implementation of a new integrated EHR.

One of the great things about the health care industry is that we are always willing to learn from one another. Continue reading →

Beyond the core Electronic Health Record

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Hospitals have been either implementing or replacing their core electronic health record (EHR) in recent years. The work has included the entire suite of applications that make up the revenue cycle, patient access, and advanced clinicals in both inpatient and outpatient settings. But as we look beyond the core EHR, there is much more potential for technology.

This week at UMHS, clinicians and staff did a two day “deep dive” into the next group of applications as we move forward with our EHR. Teams from transplant, anesthesiology, radiology, cardiology, and home care reviewed Epic’s capabilities so we can decide what will be included in our next phase of work – what we call MiChart Stage 4. These important assessments require an in-depth review of current capabilities, and an understanding of the product roadmap. Continue reading →

MiChart – the beat goes on

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Walking down the hall at our University Hospital last week, I ran into a UMHS senior leader I hadn’t seen in weeks. He asked me how MiChart was going – that’s the program name for our new integrated electronic health record. I said “very well.” I joked there are no picket lines outside my office and I’m not getting nastygram emails. I’m actually getting to focus on a lot of other things now, compared to those first few weeks after our MiChart Stage 3 inpatient go live two months ago. Our clinicians and other staff are adapting pretty well and, overall, things are going smoothly.

With this stage of our Epic implementation completed, we now have an integrated system across ambulatory, inpatient, hospital outpatient departments, and revenue cycle. Continue reading →