Healthcare organizations commit significant resources to EHR implementation, then find they cannot sustain improvement once the project team disbands. The system goes live, the consultants leave and optimization becomes whatever individual departments can push through on their own.
The consequences accumulate quietly. Enhancement requests pile up with no defensible way to rank them. Workflow problems that create daily rework get documented and never resolved. IT, clinical leadership and operations each keep a version of the priority list and none of them match. Clinicians stop flagging problems once it becomes clear that flagging them changes nothing.
What is missing is not effort. It is a structure that settles who decides. Two critical access hospitals built one, and their leaders will describe how it works in this Oct. 28 session. Erin Chytka, chief ancillary officer at Cozad (Neb.) Community Hospital, and Sydney Wemple, nursing administration coordinator for clinical informatics at Pershing General Hospital in Lovelock, Nev., will cover the governance they created, how they rank requests against the capacity they actually have and how they gave front-line staff a real role in the decision.
Learnings include:
- Why optimization stalls when governance and ownership stay undefined
- How to prioritize enhancements against limited implementation capacity
- Ways to engage nurses, physicians and ancillary teams in identifying fixes
- How to align IT, clinical and operations around shared EHR performance goals