Becker's Hospital Review

60 CIO / HEALTH IT 8 hospital CIOs share their most exciting EHR project in 2021 By Katie Adams H ere, eight hospital CIOs share the EHR project they've been most excited by or proud of in 2021, from integrating home care to facilitating mass vaccination efforts to improving the patient experience. Editor's note: Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and style. Lisa Stump. Senior Vice President and CIO at Yale New Haven (Conn.) Health. Over the last year we have expanded our presence in home care with several new visiting nurse and home care programs. To support them, we implemented Epic's Home Care module (Doro- thy) to provide a fully integrated experience with our EMR as patients transition between acute care, ambulatory and home care. is is the latest extension of the EMR into a new business line and was an excit- ing enhancement to continuity and efficiency. Zafar Chaudry, MD. Senior Vice President & CIO at Seattle Children's. My most exciting and challenging EHR project this past year has been our Cerner to Epic conversion at Seattle Children's, which went live in October 2020, in the middle of the pandemic. It was a 20-month project from start to finish, and we went live with 20+ Epic modules at the same time. Some key details from the project: 535 team members and patient families participated in direction-setting sessions; 341,000 hours of IT employee time was dedicated to developing Seattle Children's EHR with Epic; 94,000 hours of non-IT staff time including clinical and operational teams — combined, that amounted to 39 years of work performed within the past 18 months; 14,700 hours of instructor-led 100 percent virtual Epic training (which was a first) with more than 2,500 training sessions to train 9,982 people. Tom Barnett. Vice President and Chief Information and Digital Officer of Baptist Memorial Health Care (Memphis, Tenn.). e most exciting EHR project the team is working on this year is build- ing a completely new and innovative "clinic of the future" with our partner, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Mississippi. Every aspect of the tra- ditional primary care experience is being challenged to make it more patient-centric and wellness-focused. It's really stretching the teams to think about the EHR's workflows differently. R. Hal Baker, MD. Chief Digital and Information Officer at Well- Span Health (York, Pa.). e COVID-19 pandemic dominated the healthcare system again in 2021. However, this year we were able to shi to a proactive approach when vaccinations were approved for emergency use by the FDA. Configuring our electronic patient sys- tem, MyWellSpan, was at the heart of facilitating WellSpan Health's role in the largest community vaccination effort in U.S. history. When our governor gave us permission to start giving COVID-19 vaccines to patients this winter, our team was ready to help lead the charge. In less than four hours of the governor's announcement, we launched an online registration site that allowed patients to schedule their first shot. Within 30 hours of launching, more than 46,000 pa- tients had scheduled appointments for their initial dose. We subsequently developed a high-volume immunization clinic that allowed each station to perform 12 shots an hour. We integrated pre-appointment consents with text message reminders through My- WellSpan to help patients prepare for arrival. Additionally, we built in post-appointment prompts sent to a patient's mobile phone to guide them in scheduling a second shot before they even sat down for the 15-minute waiting period to ensure there was no reaction to the vac- cine. It was technology supporting healthcare as it should be. Michael Minear. Senior Vice President and CIO at Lehigh Valley Health Network (Allentown, Pa.).Without a doubt, the most excit- ing EHR project was using our Epic EHR to deliver a large COVID vaccination program for our community. When the COVID vaccine became available in late December 2020, we needed to figure out how to support this new type of vaccination. Almost everything about this was new and hard. We had to make up many things ranging from new workflows for mass vaccination sites, synchronize with the new federal/state methods to order this vaccine, deal with multiple vaccine manufacturers when planning vaccination clinics, create new real time vaccine inventory tools, set up everything around a vaccination clinic while not able to predict how many vaccine doses our organization would get and when, new ways to create vaccine clinic slots — but only for a subset of people defined by the state depart- ment of health that changed week by week — and synchronize all these new workflow and EHR capabilities with broad community messaging. For the first quarter of 2021, it seemed everything was focused on COVID vaccination — lots of meetings and long days. Our Lehigh Valley Health Network has delivered more than 428,000 COVID vac- cine doses and our community has achieved a higher level of vacci- nation than most. is project was important to our patients and our entire community. It was hard but very rewarding. Joel Klein, MD. Senior Vice President and CIO of University of Maryland Medical System (Baltimore).Without a doubt it was the huge vaccination effort. We set up mass vaccination sites in a conven- tion center, an NFL stadium and a ballroom-sized lecture hall with public self-signup and a super-fast experience end-to-end. We have surpassed administering 642,000 doses of the vaccine and helped Maryland become the sixth most-vaccinated state in the country. ere were lots of little things we did to make the process smoother as we went along, but it was the size, speed and scope of this work that will probably and hopefully never be repeated. Myra Davis. Chief Information Innovation Officer at Texas Children's Hospital (Houston). In response to COVID-19 in 2020 and 2021, Texas Children's Hospital needed a way to continue leading care for more than 1.2 million of its children and women patients. e challenge presented to the various COVID-19 task forces was to figure out how to maintain the quali- ty of care at the same or higher volumes while keeping patients and employ- ees safe. At the same time, Texas Children's Hospital, along with its pediatric centers, urgent care and other centers desired to get the COVID-19 vaccine "Without a doubt it was the huge vaccination effort." - Dr. Joel Klein, University of Maryland Medical System

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