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Earlier this yr, Kaiser Permanente accomplished one of many largest IT tasks within the well being system’s 80-year historical past.
The well being system consolidated 12 separate situations of its EHR system throughout the state of California into simply two — one for Northern California and one for Southern California. These two giant cutovers — which concerned about 40 million affected person information — had been every accomplished in below three hours, with out a single canceled appointment or delayed process.
Kaiser’s EHR consolidation reveals that large-scale integrations may be completed with out compromising affected person care, famous Neil Cowles, the well being system’s chief info and expertise officer.
Kaiser had discovered itself working six EHR situations in Northern California and 6 in Southern California because of scalability limitations on the time the methods had been initially deployed, he defined.
“These situations had totally different configurations, workflows and affected person knowledge to suit their native service areas, which created complexity for physicians and care groups,” Cowles said.
Throughout the cutover, inpatients had been nearly discharged after which readmitted into the brand new EHR occasion. This was a technical workflow solely — sufferers didn’t need to bodily go away the ability, change rooms or expertise any interruption in care, Cowles identified.
By consolidating into simply two situations, Kaiser made duties simpler for clinicians, improved knowledge consistency and enabled extra seamless entry to affected person information throughout amenities, he famous. Affected person information are centralized, which permits care groups to shortly retrieve full medical histories — no matter the place the affected person acquired care.
Now, workflows are constant, Cowles added. Clinicians use the identical interface and processes throughout all amenities of their area, lowering employees confusion and coaching time.
“In the end, this consolidation empowers our care groups to focus extra on affected person care and fewer on navigating advanced methods,” Cowles declared.
Prior to now, when Kaiser had 12 separate EHR situations, any configuration change or code replace needed to be rolled out 12 occasions after which fastidiously synchronized to keep away from inconsistencies or downtime. With the newly consolidated methods, those self same updates are deployed solely twice — which Cowles stated reduces complexity, dangers, ongoing upkeep effort and extra IT prices.
The mission has additionally resulted in simplified scheduling, as sufferers can extra simply schedule appointments throughout hospitals and medical places of work, and employees can handle these appointments extra effectively, he identified.
He attributes the success of this consolidation mission to the shut alignment between Kaiser’s clinicians, enterprise groups and tech specialists.
“This system group practiced an over 600-step plan over 25 occasions. Many groups rehearsed a number of hand-offs and high quality checks to ensure the precise occasion went flawlessly. This achievement was solely attainable as a result of our complete system labored collaboratively, figuring out and agreeing on the vital measures of success,” Cowles remarked.
He additionally famous that automation performed a vital function in accelerating the information migration course of. It automated repetitive duties, comparable to transferring personalization settings and validating knowledge integrity, which helped scale back Kaiser’s deliberate downtime by greater than half-hour.
When planning for the mission, Cowles stated that the Kaiser’s tenet was easy: shield affected person care and keep away from operational disruption.
To do this, the well being system invested closely in preserving every customers’ expertise. Kaiser migrated particular person knowledge and personalization preferences so seamlessly that the majority employees wanted solely minimal coaching and lightweight change-management help, Cowles said.
“We offered focused on-line coaching and real-time consciousness the evening of the cutover, however the true measure of success got here afterward. When leaders rounded on clinics publish–go-live, a number of employees members requested, ‘What cutover?’ That’s precisely the end result we aimed for,” he declared.
Picture: Thomas Barwick, Getty Photographs
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