Success always comes when preparation meets opportunity ~Henry L. Hartman

As I reflect on my experience in AEHR, the above quote resonates.  Working on projects in the roles of an 11.2 Allscripts Enterprise Upgrade Project Manager, as well as an Implementation Consultant for new builds, my clients who achieve their desired results are consistently the ones who own the process and perform extensive due diligence on behalf of their organization.

Below are four factors to explore when preparing for your success. I have outlined “opportunity”, in the form of questions that must be thoughtfully answered, to optimally position your organization for seamless transition to a new Allscripts Enterprise AEHR release or platform.

1. Product Functionality, Design and Additional Considerations

2. Workflow Analysis, Testing and Training

3. Go Live Preparation

4. Leveraging HIT

Product Functionality, Design and Additional Considerations

In this day and age, “You don’t know what you don’t know” is no longer a valid response when making critical design and configuration considerations for your Enterprise AEHR.  Resources are available.

• Are you engaging in dialog with the Allscripts Community online via Client Connect  and referencing the Allscripts Application Design and Behavior Resource?
• Have you reviewed the latest Allscripts Client Release Notes that outline Known Issues lists and any issues for a release of which you should be aware?
• Have you registered for available educational opportunitiesprovided by leading professionals in the industry?
• Are you maintaining your Build Activity Workbook to reflect not only your decisions, but the thought process behind them, to ensure that a re-visitation will not constitute a reinvention of the wheel?

Workflow analysis, Testing and Training
These three elements are imperative to understanding how your build decisions will impact your organization, individual clinics and employees, right on down to your end consumers.

• Have you thoroughly vetted and documented your current and future state workflows?
• Have hybrid roles effectively been addressed?  For example, if a user is acting in a Front Desk, Medical Records, Call Processing and Referral capacity, should a customized Clinical Desktop be created to accommodate the various components necessary to perform all the associated responsibilities?
• Are your worklist and tasklist views capturing the correct data and utilizing the most meaningful criteria to cater to the specialty of your clinic?
• Are there too many views?  Is there a view for a supervisor to monitor all overdue tasks?  Is it more effective to assign tasks to specific users or to a team?
• Are your users educated on how to change their preferences to complement their individual work style within their workflows?

Go Live Preparation
Successful implementation only becomes relevant upon going live.

• Do you have adequate staff onsite to support your users and providers experiencing workflow, application and/or hardware problems?
• For Upgrades, have you created and distributed job aids highlighting new or altered functionality that may require different or unfamiliar behaviors within identified workflows (satisfying clinical quality data reporting initiatives to demonstrate Meaningful Use, for example)?
• Do you have a rollback plan if you encounter a system crippling issue? Will this necessitate a return to paper records (and are they available for reference)?  If so, who will be that decision maker and how will this message be communicated?
• Do you have a Command Center in place to serve as a centralized hub for user support, in addition to a systematic process for issue documentation and ticket submission across multiple vendors?  Is there a point person or team tracking these issues and their resolution?

Leveraging HIT
Now that you are live on AEHR, are you leveraging your Health Information Technology to fully facilitate the efforts of physicians and clinicians to meet the highest standards of patient care?  Some considerations for Enterprise organizations include:

• Participation in Meaningful Use
• A business continuity solution
• Integrated Health Calculators
• Integration with HIE

When it comes to the implementation, deployment and maintenance of your Allscripts Enterprise AEHR, success is no accident.  I encourage you to Embrace the New World of Healthcare; please contact Galen Healthcare Solutions at sales@galenhealthcare.com for more information.