Ensuring a Successful Health Care Systems Implementation

Why Should You Attend:

Computer system implementations can often go wrong. The goal is to learn from the mistakes made by those health care organizations and to take advantage of the processes that avoid those problems and repeatedly lead to successful implementations.

Large and small health care organizations invest considerable time, effort and money in considering the potential benefits of a new system and selecting the right system. The decision is important. And the proper execution of the implementation is critical. An effectively implemented computer system has the potential to be a great benefit to a health care organization. On the other hand, a disastrous computer system implementation can cause considerable difficulties for the organization in provider and staff frustration, organizational efficiency losses, costs to provide care, conflicts with the system vendor and likely the quality of care that is provided.

The tools and processes for planning for a successful implementation are the same as those needed and have been successfully used to reverse a failed system implementation. The difference is their sequence and the sense of urgency.

The tools and processes provided in this course have been used successfully in implementing health care computer systems for over 40 years – they have been used in the real world to successfully implement health care computer systems and to turn around failed health care system implementations. This presentation will discuss why they work.

Learning Objectives:

• Steps needed to ensure a successful health care computer system implementation, logic of the tools and processes, and applying them to their system implementation.
• Establishing the project’s implementation expectations, identifying meaningful metrics for success, establishing project plans, assigning individual accountabilities and responsibilities, establishing and executing project tasks, monitoring project progress and validating project success.
• Establishing viable project expectations; the process emphasizes the tasks of reassessing the project stakeholder expectations – why they decided the system would help the organization and what they expected to get from the system.
• Learning how to separate “so what” metrics from meaningful and measurable metrics.
• Steps needed to remediate these problems and maintain the continuity of the implementation process.
• Role of the implementation planning process and how to prepare the plan.
• Steps needed to monitor the progress of the project and how to respond when the project goes off plan.

Areas Covered in the Webinar:

• The attributes of a successful system implementation
• Why implementations fail and how to avoid these problems
• How to develop successful implementation expectations by all stakeholders
• How to convert the successful implementation expectations into measurable metrics
• Establishing project plans – identifying the resources needed for the project and scheduling tasks
• What is good data and the role of the conversion process
• Developing manual support procedures
• How to establish processes for addressing problems and conflicts that occur during the project
• How to monitor the progress of the project and identify when problems occur and have processes for addressing the problems
• The role out – live use of the system – actual startup
• How to know when the project is completed
• How to apply these processes to a system implementation that has failed

Who Will Benefit:

• Chief Executive Officer
• Chief Operating Officer
• Managing Partner
• Chief Financial Officer
• Office Manager
• IT Manager
• Health care software vendors wanting to ensure successful implementation

Instructor Profile:

James B Wener is a seasoned health care systems consultant with over 40 years of experience in assisting health plans and providers (hospitals, clinics, ancillary services such as labs and pharmacies, and physician groups) and clients in other industries meet their automation objectives. He has specialized in analyzing operational flow, helping health care clients establish their implementation expectations and success metrics, identifying information requirements and selecting, developing and implementing computerized solutions.

His health care clients include Rush/Prudential Health Plans in Chicago, HMO Illinois (BCBS of Illinois), Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, Harris Health Plans in Dallas (as part of their being acquired by BCBS Texas), Horizon Health Plans (BCBS of New Jersey), HealthFirst in New York and Mercy Health Plans in Wisconsin and Illinois, Mercy Hospital in Chicago, University of Miami School of Medicine and other HMOs, IPAs, TPAs, clinics, hospitals and professional provider groups of all sizes.

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