Surgery Partners’ Great Falls Clinic Hospital cost-effective MEDITECH Expanse clinical implementation with Healthcare Triangle remote consulting model
The Client
Surgery Partners’ clinic is located in Great Falls, Montana, the 3rd largest city in Montana. The health system consists of Great Falls Main Clinic, Great Falls Clinic Surgery Center, Great Falls Clinic Specialty Center and Great Falls Clinic Hospital with Emergency Department and a 20- bed acute inpatient unit. Great Falls strives to assess and meet the needs of the 250,000 residents living in the seventeen north central Montana counties that they serve. They are dedicated to improving the health of the people they serve.
The Challenge
Great Falls Clinic made the decision to move to an integrated electronic health record for its hospital and ambulatory clinics. Moving to a new integrated electronic health record (EHR) would require a substantial number of operational on-site resources working to architect, design, build, and train the new EHR. Organizationally, with limited resources and a high rate of turnover, GFC needed supplemental resources to provide expert consulting and advisory services. The partner needed to have vast Expanse implementation experience and ability to provide an innovative, cost-effective and proven support model.
Why Healthcare Triangle (HCTI)
HCTI proposed an innovative approach to the Expanse implementation that assured delivery of high-quality, effective consulting services. With proven experience in successful remote-consulting implementation services for MEDITECH’s Expanse software, HCTI presented a balanced approach for Surgery Partners Great Falls Clinic Hospital success. HCTI provided and facilitated a primarily remote implementation model, that would allow the site to move forward in this endeavour allowing the client to meet their quality and budgetary goals for the engagement.
The Solution
HCTI served as project leadership and subject matter experts in both business and clinical provider practice areas including nursing, surgical services, emergency and ambulatory. Here are a key examples of the approach taken remotely by HCTI to ensure an effective and successful implementation of the MEDITECH Expanse platform. These activities helped Great Falls meet their goal of one integrated electronic health record while controlling project costs:
- HCTI leveraged their cloud expertise to create and manage a remote framework that allowed real time and scheduled collaboration to minimize the need for initial on-site visits to map and outline current state workflows. While some onsite visits were not eliminated, these initial on-site walk throughs were streamlined to reduce the impact on normal business operations, with additional work being completed remotely to fine tune the deliverables
- HCTI remotely reviewed all standard content and made suggestions for changes that would fit with the site’s organizational goals and future workflow processes. This was accomplished by highligHCTIng the key changes, sharing the recommendations, and reviewing of every document and dictionary on screen
- HCTI, with the foundation of their blueprint of recommendations, facilitated and led remote educational/build sessions using video conferencing for the clinical/nursing teams. HCTI remote consultants worked ‘hand in hand’ with the client teams to collaboratively update and validate the recommended changes. Sessions were recorded and reviewed as the client team resources had no experience with implementing an integrated platform and could serve as detailed documentation of all decisions and edits
Benefits
Based on the established goals of GFC, HCTI developed a cost effect support model that allowed the use of previously developed tools, proven methodologies, and innovative technologies to reduce the GFC commitment of time, based on resourcing challenges.
HCTI’s superior quality of delivery was evident across the continuum of the project. Starting with the current state workflow definition, through the design, educate, and build phases to the successful attainment of the Future State workflows that were developed and agreed upon through the efforts of the client teams and their HCTI consultant partners, quality was the cornerstone.
HCTI, using the proven model of staying the course with Standard Content and embracing Best Practices was able to minimize the time commitment of client staff. By adapting a focused customization plan HCTI was able to achieve the client’s specific goals and meet regulatory requirements in a timely and cost-effective model.
HCTI, capitalizing on their collective expertise in implementations, brought to the client effective education/training regarding the design and build of the system. This experience brought to the table remotely, allowed the teams to focus on the goal and move steadily toward it while keeping travel expenses to a minimum.
Following this innovative and proven model GFC, with HCTI as their partner of choice, successfully went live with a fully integrated Electronic Health Record in early January 2020. GFC continues to realize the benefits of one EHR as they continue to partner with HCTI to optimize as opportunities present.