If you’ve ever experienced a ‘go-live’ for a new EMR then you’ve probably wondered why all the potential functionality of the system wasn’t immediately available at go-live. So often, as a consultant, I hear how the pharmacy, medical staff or another area of the hospital would like a specific functionality but either the system doesn’t easily deliver it or it stresses the scope or budget of the project so it’s delayed until sometime after the go-live. Is this expected? Is this acceptable? Should we delay go-lives or increase our budgets to provide full system functionality immediately upon activation? Will we continue to find additional functions the system can perform and continue to push our go-live date? In this case, time is money, but where do we draw the line?
There are several schools of thought that should be considered. First, we can define our scope at the beginning of the project and not deviate from it. This gives us our best chance to go-live at the planned time and at the planned cost. However, the medication management process is a very complex process with many variations in workflow at different sites. It is very common to identify workflow and system improvements as we move through the implementation process. A second school of thought is to continuously improve the system as we move through the implementation process and attempt to meet the needs and wants of our key stakeholders. Projects following this model tend to move their go-live date multiple times and go significantly over budget. But are the end-users, the pharmacists, physicians, nurses and others, happier with the delivered product?
Or is the answer somewhere in between the two concepts above? Will the actual time from project initiation to actual completion of system ‘optimization’ differ in either of these two models? Is it just that the first model, sticking to scope and timeline, goes live during the process of optimization instead of at a point of system maximization (there should never be an end-point to optimization)? This is a challenge that all project leaders have to consider early in the project. Then they must obtain the support of key stakeholders and share the message – either ‘we will stick to our scope and optimize the system post go-live’ or ‘we will deliver a system to meet as many of the identified needs of our stakeholders as possible’.
#Technology #MedicationManagement