Just a recap – my institution is going live with a new electronic medical record (EMR) in December and I decided to write about my experience with a countdown to the final days. My first countdown post can be found here. It’s 191 days before go-live. Uh-oh. We have less than 200 days to make this the best EMR this particular hospital has ever seen. I haven’t posted a go-live update in awhile because of the stress I endured and very nervous about my own work I wasn’t sure I would have completed. We have had several deadlines and have built the system as much as we can. There were several things going on at the same time: environment migration, unit testing, and the CPM user launch to name a few. There are always many items we are all juggling at the same time. Multitasking is a requirement for this job. All of the teams have finally migrated from one environment to another and all of our build is in our testing environment. But, all of the analysts needs to check to see if their build was moved and if not, must be manually built in order to test. Unit testing has commenced and integrated testing will start in a few weeks. We also had our user Clinical Practice Model (CPM) user launch this past week and was well received. Our clinicians were excited and anxious at the same time. They had many questions for us. This computer system is
different from what they are used to and has more functionality than the current computer system. In a few weeks, we will begin our care plan training, patient education teaching in July, and professional exchange hand-off in August. All at the same time as integrated testing and content building. Things are getting quite hectic since our go-live date is in 7 short months. Time is coming near and I can see people are on edge and are getting exhausted. I think its easier for a hospital to go from paper to electronic rather than electronic to electronic. The end users at this hospital are savvy end users and expect the same functionality or more in the new system. These are a few examples of how stressful a go-live can be. I can’t say that an inpatient implementation is stress-free and there are issues and problems along the way. Of course there are always going to be lessons learned. I don’tstress about the things I don’t have control over. Happy Memorial Day!
