By investing in the proper people and training staff, says Jose Garcia, manager for enterprise storage and backup at UCLA Medical Center.
The hospital released a bid for proposals for Epic and CareConnect installation to develop the foundation of the system’s new IT infrastructure.
“We had 64 disparate solutions and applications,” Mr. Garcia says. “None of them spoke to each other well. They weren’t sharing information.”
The bid to fix that problem eventually went to Key Information Systems (KeyInfo), a systems integration provider. In addition to contracting with KeyInfo, UCLA hired outside expertise to assist with the IT overhaul. Mr. Garcia was part of the expertise acquired by UCLA.
The new IT system, to be supported on Epic’s platform, was to be built from the ground up, using no existing hardware or network infrastructure, Mr. Garcia says. “It was a brand new solution that UCLA or any other hospital didn’t know what they were getting into.”
However, the expertise chosen to develop and implement the system made all the difference. Six team members chosen by KeyInfo and Mr. Garcia all had previous experience working on Epic deployment at California hospitals.
The teams deployed the new IT system in four months in 2011, the fastest time to date for an EHR implementation. Then in 2014, the hospital underwent an upgrade to the next release of Epic and CareConnect. The upgrade took just a couple of hours, Mr. Garcia says. “We were looking for errors, and there weren’t any,” Mr .Garcia says.
Again, Mr. Garcia attributes the success and ease of the upgrade to the team and sufficient planning.
“KeyInfo brought in skill sets to employ the hardware. Parallel to that process, UCLA ventured out to hire the skill sets needed to deploy the hardware and continue to maintain it,” Mr. Garcia says. “We as experts [working with Epic] knew what was going to come and we knew what was required to deploy it.”
While KeyInfo and the system experts were working on the deployment of the new system, Mr. Garcia says they were already training staff and end users on how to use the new system, which he says is one of the keys of a successful implementation.
Additionally, executive leadership should be aware that such an overhaul is not a one-time investment; rather, it’s on-going. Mr. Garcia says that if the implementation is successful, then it is going to grow and the organization will have to keep up. “It has to be flexible,” Mr. Garcia says. “You don’t deploy a solution for the now. You deploy a solution for tomorrow, for the ‘what ifs.’ If you deploy something for now, you’re already behind.”
More articles on health IT:
Epic decoded: An inside look at life and corporate culture at the center of the health IT world
Apple’s ResearchKit to give researchers access to iPhone user data
UCLA to pilot inclusion of genomic data in EHR
