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Using A Standard EHR Approach


July 15, 2008

Because Oregon Health and Science University has 59 clinics, two hospitals and 800 salaried faculty physicians, implementing an enterprisewide electronic health records system was a daunting task. To greatly simplify implementation at the clinics, the academic medical center developed a standardized, 10-week approach, using a team of clinical experts to guide each implementation.

After launching the EHR at about five clinics late in 2005, the organization used the regimented approach to roll it out to all the other outpatient sites by last March. Now it’s turning its efforts to implementing the software, from Epic Systems Corp., Verona, Wis., at its hospitals.

The assembly-line strategy was essential because of the complexity and scope of the project, which got off to a somewhat rocky start, says Thomas Yackel, M.D., associate medical information officer.

OHSU executives spent several months evaluating all of the practice sites to determine which ones would be ready to go live first. Some of the delivery system’s physicians indicated they didn’t want to change the way they practiced outpatient care to use an EHR, Yackel recalls.

The organization also faced a time crunch because some of the practices were planning to move into a new building in 2006. They didn’t want to bring their paper records with them.

So after deploying the EHR at Yackel’s and a handful of other OHSU practices in late 2005, he and other clinicians created a toolkit of standard weekly agendas and documents to enable each of the remaining facilities to go live with the application.

“We needed to bring each practice up in 10 weeks because of our deadline and how many practices we had,” Yackel says. “But we also knew making the system simple and consistent would bring a huge number of benefits.”

Details on how OHSU pulled off the task are in the July issue of Health Data Management, available here.

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