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E M R
D I A R Y
complete their part of the review is a big time-consumer. Sometimes
we wait for days until we know if the test patient passed the interface
successfully. All these reviewers are in different time zones and have
different priorities, so the testing isn't complete until they get to it.
The solution would be for all areas to commit focused time, for as
long as it takes to complete this testing.
Don't do as I do, do as I say
I can't share the joy of a completed implementation with you, but I can
share what we did wrong and what we did right throughout this process.
Our failures:
• Not hiring dedicated EMR staff. We didn't understand the need to hire
or assign a dedicated project manager and 4 other dedicated full-time
staff from the beginning. A dedicated project manager would have
streamlined many steps of this process and prevented many hours of
correcting others' data entry. One of the dedicated positions should
be an IT person as a partner to the project manager. If I hadn't spent
so much time driving the interface testing and trying to learn the IT
processes, the clinical side would have been completed 2 months
ago.
• Not holding everyone accountable. We've had weekly status update
meetings since we began in March. Everyone was invited, but only the
vendor and the clinical staff participated. From the very beginning, we
needed to hold everyone accountable for their participation and ownN O V E M B E R 2012 | O U T PAT I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E O N L I N E
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