| | November 20168UTLOOK Healthcare Tech OpinionIn myEHR Implementation ­ The Anatomy of SuccessBy George Curtis, CIO & HIPAA Security Officer, Houston HealthcareIt is true that all of us who grew up in healthcare IT and often the newcomers are inundated with the easy, the turn-key, and the set-and-forget solution for a wildly successful implementation of an EMR/EHR offered for a nominal and sometimes astronomical fee from our vendors. Keystone elements: always include your physicians, tap key opinion leaders, involve your nursing staff, develop a steering committee, have a good communication plan, celebrate your wins, and so on and so forth through the realm of projects and into success.I am not discounting these important elements of a good project; however, asking our already time-strapped providers and clinicians to do a good bit more lands this project solidly outside the line of "common IT Projects" and hence has a higher failure rate and price tag than many IT projects. In the wake of ushering in the electronic, redundant, and interconnected new world of EMR/EHR's, there are a string of broken careers that are scarcely owned by only the CIO's. Moreover, these tattered and sometimes irreparably damaged careers belong to the CEO, CFO, CMO, and a few other C's that have been developed over the past few years. Knowing that the EMR/EHR revolution is inevitable, too many of us who are at the helm of healthcare rush headlong into the oncoming storm blindly throwing limited resources, time and money at a problem we don't completely understand. From it we have gained clunky systems that are dangerous to the patient, inefficient workflows that aggravate the most patient of providers, and inconsistent data that are a symptom of the two previous results. There is too much advice on how to do it right, too much reliance on the buzz-words of healthcare, and not enough out of the box practical thinking when addressing a solution. Given the complexity of EMR/EHR systems I dare not offer a solution for this overwhelming project that requires a tireless and unforgiving taskmaster, rather, I do want to share what we did and as a pleasant side effect; it became our anatomy of success.According to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, nursing informatics is defined as: "Nursing Informatics (NI) is a specialty that integrates nursing science, computer science, and information science to manage and communicate data, information knowledge and wisdom in nursing practice." How you George Curtis
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