Moving from MEDITECH to Epic
One Hospital System’s Formula for Navigating the Unknown
The Client
Private, nonprofit hospital system being acquired by another hospital system.
The Facility
The acquired hospital system is a private, nonprofit organization comprised of an acute care hospital, an ambulatory campus, and senior living communities. They offer a wide range of outpatient services from primary and urgent care, to laboratory and rehabilitation. They have been awarded four Magnet designations from the American Nurses Credentialing Center.
The acquired hospital system was on MEDITECH and Soarian and would not be certified or trained in Epic prior to go-live, per the acquiring system’s decision. This model posed many challenges for the hospital due to a lack of Epic knowledge.
Results
- General Project Advising and Involvement.
- Epic Acquisition Planning to build foundations for success.
- Epic Implementation Education for IT leaders and team.
- Epic Tool and Template Review.
- Clinical Operational Readiness (CORe) to ensure patient safety and staff readiness.
- Provider Engagement Program to instill confidence, trust, and readiness.
- Cutover Support to plan for a successful move to production.
- Go-live Support from project advisor.
- IT Overall Project Planning & Guidance to help avoid common pitfalls.
The Challenge
Advising the acquired hospital system throughout the acquisition and implementation of Epic at their hospital and clinics, helping their leadership, IT team, and staff to become knowledgeable and conversant on Epic was the mission of this project. The health system would bring Epic live in their outpatient clinics first, including charging and billing. Then they would implement Epic at the hospital a few months later. Having familiarity with the Epic system, vernacular, and methodology all contributed to the avoidance of major pitfalls during the install, as well as to their successful go-live on Epic in their 12-month timeframe.
How We Helped
CereCore staffed an advisor to help leadership throughout the negotiation process as well as throughout the implementation to assist with navigating project challenges, questions, and to assist in various areas across the install. Guidance was needed upfront for early discussions and planning on the project goals, timelines, and a handful of important system build decisions. The health system wanted ears in the project to listen for anything concerning or out of the ordinary and then to help them understand the issues and how to best approach their implementers with suggestions and questions. CereCore's Advisor was a sounding board for all topics and complexities and helped provide solutions and best practice recommendations where needed. The advisor staffed to the project had over 15 years of Epic experience, including executive advising, to bring to the table.
The advising started out with recommendations regarding reporting decisions, facility structure system design, billing office options, project governance, project tools and timeline planning. Next, we helped to review the project Charter and important materials and met with executives early on to talk through who would be needed for the installation. Once work was underway, CereCore monitored the outpatient work, but shifted focus to the hospital side of the project where more assistance was needed due to a larger scope and complexity of work. As the project progressed, new challenges related to hospital outpatient departments, policy review, go-live planning, clinical operational readiness, cutover planning, and downtime business continuity access were discovered. CereCore was asked to bring in an additional advisor to help in various specialized areas and even assist where operational turnover left gaps in the internal project staffing.
Highly experienced, skilled, and certified technical and clinical operations advisors assisted with planning, implementing, assessing, training, and more. Some of their duties included:
Epic acquisition planning. Aided executive leadership during high level decisions and negotiation points that were foundational to ultimate success.
Epic tool and template review. Assessed the project charter and timeline to identify missing information and details or steps to help finalize the project schedule.
Cutover planning and execution. Created a crosswalk document to assist all users involved in cutover with previous orders from their legacy system and new orders in Epic. Assisted with identifying security updates needed for cutover execution. Created dress rehearsals for cutover to solidify timing and number of users needed. Provided experienced analyst on site to assist with cutover day and bridge gaps in knowledge with end-users and to trouble shoot with analyst teams.
General project advising and involvement. Attended and conducted meetings to advise on actions to ensure go-live readiness for providers, critical hospital staff, and those involved with revenue processes.
HOD advisory services. Offered specific support to hospital outpatient departments (HOD) to accommodate their needs versus the billing, charging, referral, etc. needs of the hospitals and overall system.
Ongoing provider engagement. Mapped out provider engagement plans and deadlines through go-live and then rounded with hospital leadership during go-live to identify issues and resolve them quickly.
Clinical operational readiness advisory services. Reviewed policies (ex: critical results, restraints), order sets (ex: order panel, protocols), KPIs, and workflow changes (ex: chart, admit, discharge to ensure coordinated policies, changes, and evaluation criteria across multiple service lines. This also included cutover planning and execution.
