In Healthcare IT, it is common to have an ebb and flow of people from your organization. Some sites are seeing more ebb than flow lately, however. Maybe these situations sound familiar:
You spent time, effort and money to certify your system support analysts only to have them leave for greener pastures. Then you must start that whole process repeatedly.
Your team is working hard on the next upgrade, and you just learned that now they also need to work on build for a new practice/service line. There are not enough people to address these needs.
Your more experienced Project Manager decided to make a career change.
You are kicking off a project and already find that you have scope creep. You are missing the analysts you need or the level of project management you need, and you struggle to keep the project timeline on track.
It is expensive to keep retraining, rehiring, and rebuilding. How can you maintain a good level of experience on your teams without having those talented people stay? You just need help!
Bridging those gaps in experience, leadership, and talent are difficult unless you have a strategic partner. How do you choose the right partner? What qualities are you looking for?
Flexible range of services
Why have multiple vendors when you can have one vendor offer breadth and depth in all your needs?
Having Staff Augmentation is just the tip of the iceberg. You want to have experienced help available to come in quickly and hit the ground running when you need it.
Are you dealing with small outages that you just need short term help for? Life events happen like parental leave or medical leave. You still need to keep your projects going and provide support. Short-term staff augmentation can help with that burden.
What about the possibility of having some customized managed services to fill gaps in support or helpdesk so your staff can focus on new projects? Sometimes it makes more sense to have someone else handle a portion of your services rather than spend that time and money to do it yourselves. Some organizations don’t need a full-time employee to cover those applications you use, but you can’t find talented people to cover those needs. Read more in our article: Addressing Epic EHR Support Gaps When Resources are Scarce.
Advisory services to help guide and mentor your PMO/Project Managers or even your leadership team can help to get past hurdles. Launching a new project with the right foundation and tools will help save time and money. Maybe a package to launch your project would help to jump start things quickly and efficiently.
When one health system’s staffing plan to support the Epic EHR go-live in two newly acquired hospitals was 160% of their allocated budget for the project, CereCore helped them find the way to keep at-the-elbow support costs within budget. Read more in our Creative Staffing Coordination for Budget Friendly Epic Implementationscase study.
Implementation advisory services can help with the details of configuring EHR functions to work well with your facility’s IT ecosystem. Involving an expert at this level can go far to help you mitigate risks by anticipating common issues. There is more to your organization than the Epic EHR. Make sure you have a partner that can take a look at that broader picture. Have you thought about your helpdesk support staffing/structure, cloud services, legacy archive, and more? Having a partner that can handle anything that may come up is a bonus!
A new approach to clinical system support, the Clinical Service Desk, helps you respond to clinicians and resolve their issues at the speed of healthcare. The approach involves support analysts with specific EHR knowledge to help answer physician calls faster, reduce the time to resolution, and reduce incidents escalated to Level 2 teams. See what our clients say about this approach to helping clinicians get expert support on the first call on our Clinical Service Desk page.
Results of CereCore’s Clinical Service Desk Services
Focus on talent and real-life experience
Those with the knowledge of hospital operators bring the focus and experience your team could need. Many of our advisors started as nurses and hospital staff. We understand that in this job we are all just a few steps away from the patient's bedside. With this hospital operator experience comes a depth of understanding of the whole hospital and healthcare ecosystem that will enhance your partnership.
Working with a partner who understands how to manage interfaces with third party systems, interface engines, and has the capacity to help you manage them can be a game changer. Consider this comment from Oklahoma Heart Hospital’s CIO regarding partnership during their recent EHR implementation project:
“For all the nights that I tossed and turned worried about how we were going to connect 128 different interfaces and make them all work, I do have to give a ton of credit to the project team that CereCore put together for us. The interaction that Jim and others from Epic had with that group of people. We literally, I mean, I can't think of one major interface issue we had. And not only did we do the 128 that were there before, we added some that we worked on, then we're still working on some now that we knew were not going to be there go live. But again, I cannot give enough credit to Jim, A, and to the staff that CereCore gave us and the way they worked and their effort. It was really truly special.” - David Miles, CIO
Hear more from David on a recent episode of The CereCore Podcast.
You need experience with not only implementations but what comes after. How are you handling upgrades, service updates, etc.? What about handling Change control/Change management? Do you have time to handle informatics requests? This work requires handling the human side as well as the technical sides of things. We have been through all the life-cycle phases of the EHR with multiple customers. We have “lessons learned” that we can share with you from our experiences. Read more in our blog Implementing Epic? Don't Overlook Fundamentals Like Change Management.
Concierge treatment
You want a vendor partner organization who cares about what struggles you are going through and what makes the most sense for your broader IT ecosystem. You deserve to be treated with respect.
Going the extra mile. When you ask for staff augmentation, wouldn’t it be nice to know that you also have a dedicated team who are there if you need them. We don’t push things you don’t need. We help you to “right size” plans for you. Sometimes you need a sounding board for the various challenges that come along the way.
CereCore: One Healthcare IT Partner, a Source for Many Services
CereCore is here for all your HealthCare IT needs. Our team has a wide range of services from Epic Advisory Services, Epic Managed Services, and Epic Staff Augmentation. On top of these services, we also offer L1 Service Desk, Clinical Help Desk, and MyChart Help Desk. We offer services outside of Epic, including Legacy Archive, Data Conversion, Cloud options and more. Win the Epic Staffing game in a partnership with CereCore.
In Healthcare IT, it is common to have an ebb and flow of people from your organization. Some sites are seeing more ebb than flow lately, however. Maybe these situations sound familiar:
A highly customized EHR in need of costly updates challenged the new CIO at Oklahoma Heart Hospital to evaluate the technology stack he inherited and chart a new course at this award-winning...
