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Fairview Leverages Seasoned Project Managers to Ensure Successful EMR Rollouts
Fairview Health Services is a regionally integrated health care network of preventive, primary, specialty, acute care, long-term care, and home care services headquartered in Minneapolis. Fairview employs more than 22,000 people across the state of Minnesota. Fairview Health Services includes seven hospitals, 48 primary care clinics, six urgent care clinics and a wide range of specialty service centers. Fairview’s large integrated medical practice includes 450 Fairview-employed physicians and 550 affiliated academic physicians within University of Minnesota Physicians. Fairview also works closely with Fairview Physician Associates, a network of 630 closely aligned independent physicians. Fairview is one of the 10 top health systems in the country, according to the Thomson Reuters 100 Top Hospitals: Health System Quality/Efficiency Benchmarks study.
Fairview Health Services
Todd Aldrich, Program Manager for the Epic Innovations Project (contracted resource)
“Aspen Advisors served in key partner roles essential to our team’s success in implementing Epic at both our regional and metro hospitals. They helped us apply lessons learned and experience from prior implementations to ensure that we were well prepared for the cutover at each hospital site. I greatly appreciate what Aspen has provided as they were a critical part to our successful implementation at University of Minnesota Medical Center.”
THE CHALLENGE
Fairview had been using EpicCare in one of its physician practice groups (Fairview Physicians) for eight years. The other practice, University of Minnesota Physicians, operated Allscripts. Inpatient clinicals across Fairview’s seven hospitals was supported by Eclipsys SCM, McKesson Paragon, and paper processes. Fairview was implementing Epic inpatient and revenue cycle tools across the enterprise, integrating with their existing EpicCare ambulatory system. Three months before Fairview’s first go-live, which was at two regional hospitals, Fairview Lakes Medical Center and Fairview Northland Medical Center, it determined it needed assistance in several key roles with tactical planning for the rollouts.
THE SOLUTION
Aspen was engaged in August 2010, just 90 days before Fairview’s first go-live to serve as a native guide in several key roles to help with tactical planning to ensure successful rollouts including:
- Inpatient Clinical Teams Project Manager – responsible for leading and managing multiple client and vendor teams configuring Epic inpatient modules including Orders, ClinDoc, OpTime, ASAP, Beacon, and Willow. This included day-to-day project management of the program, development and management of the detailed project plan, planning staffing and resources, maintaining issues logs and working through program escalation, identifying risks and recommending mitigation processes, and identifying and escalating scope issues;
- Cutover Project Manager - responsible for ensuring that all ancillaries, interfaces, and go live teams were working in synch toward successful cutovers. This included working with application teams and ancillary departments to build a minute-by-minute sequenced plan of all activities necessary to launch the new technical configuration in a limited timeframe; planning, organizing, and conducting dry runs to validate the detailed cutover plan; updating the detailed plans based on findings discovered in the dry runs; engaging necessary resources from across the organization as needed and building a detailed staffing model; coordinating cutover activities within the overall Site Readiness Plan; working shifts as needed as the Command Center Manager after go-live; and communicating plans with the program leadership and Site leadership; and;
- Dress Rehearsal Coordination Project Manager – responsible for designing cross-application end-user testing scenarios to prepare site users for the go-lives, as well as final integration testing of the Epic build. This included identification of patient scenarios, end user device integration, creation of dress rehearsal patient records, validation of all activities before end user execution, communication of the plan, support structure for end users, and management of the issue capture and resolution process.
THE RESULTS
In October 2010, two paper-based Fairview regional hospitals successfully went live with Epic clinical and revenue cycle applications, achieving greater than 80 percent physician CPOE adoption. All teams provided 24x7 at-the-elbow and on-call support for four weeks with a high degree of end-user satisfaction. Then in March 2011, Fairview’s two largest hospitals, totaling 1300 beds and separated by a quarter mile and the mighty Mississippi River, went live at the same time converting from an Eclipsys SCM system. The go-live was widely praised as a success throughout the organization, and the 24-hour command center was retired one week early. Going forward, Fairview will be preparing for a mini-go-live in mid Summer with HOD / OP areas and the next two hospitals to go-live in October 2011. Aspen’s contributions included planning, practicing, and executing the cutover of patient records for both go-lives. Prior to go-live, Aspen coordinated five weeks of targeted patient care simulations for cross-department workflow modeling and user acceptance testing, as well as four dry run cutover practice sessions including inpatient and HOD areas: cath lab, surgery, electro-convulsive therapy, psychiatric intake, med-surg, ED, dialysis, apheresis, and others. Aspen also led the clinical applications teams through the build, test, and support phases for these go-lives.
