Question

Home Health of America is about to implement the new (EHR) Electronic Health Record. This (EHR) Electronic Health Record will be used by all of the nurses, nursing aides, therapists, and other staff members who work with patients in the patient’s home. It will also be accessed in the home office for billing and other administrative purposes. The chief executive officer mandated the big bang go-live strategy. He also mandated that the go-live begin on Monday, which is their busiest day. His thoughts were that if the EHR could handle Monday, then it could handle anything. The users ran into several problems on the first day. Some of the functionality did not work, the cellular connections used to connect to the IS did not work at some of the homes, and the documentation was slow, which prevented them from seeing the patients in a timely manner. They had planned for some overtime as they knew that documenting in the new EHR would be slower. The overtime ended up being twice what was expected and they still did not see three of the patients. The decision was made to go back to the paper system while the problems were worked out.

1. Identify the implementation issues in the case.

2. If you worked for Home Health of America and the chief executive officer mandated the big bank go-live strategy, what would you have done?

Answer 1

1) The implementation issues which was encountered in the above mentioned case is that, The failures were under-estimated or rather the time that would be used in problem solving was under-estimated.

Hospital and healthcare organisations are not the most tech friendly organisation. They come under some of the most traditionally run profession. The doctors, nurses and other health care providers are more focused on treating the patients as opposed to being tech savvy or adapt to new technologies all at once.

The biggest implementation issue in the case is going big bang go-live. It works in big MNC where they are more accustomed to such softwares and programs. Unfortunately in a healthcare organisation, these strategic implementations should be more PHASED OUT. Time should be given to the healthcare providers to get adapted to the new feature.

Proper training should be provided to those who are directly responsible for bringing about such a change.

Implementation failure due to the unavailability of cellular network is a foreseeable failure and a contingency plan should have been formulated to manage such situations.

The busiest day should not have been chosen for the implementation of the plan.

A trial run should have been done before outright implementing it. That way, not real harm or delayed patient visitations would take place.

2) Had i worked for Home Health of America and the CEO mandated the big bang go=live strategy, i would have reasoned with his/her about the possible cons related to such a high risk strategy plan and how it would affect the finally outcome, which was the treatment of patients getting delayed. The primary goal of any health organisation is to first serve its patients. And Strategies that could hinder with this, should always be phased out to reduce the effect of the high risk model such as a big bang go-live strategy.