Epic transformation requires thousands of decisions

Stair: Welcome back to The Epic Guys. Stu, you know, a transformation of this magnitude requires just a few decisions to be made – like thousands. We have to look at all of our note templates, our admission order sets, our cancer treatment plans, how we set up our patient portal in our in basket, and how we do all of our scheduling and billing processes.

Booth: Yeah, and overseeing these decisions requires strong governance, and we have it. You need to know where the decisions are made, how they flow, and where the buck stops when they’re critical or even controversial. Today we’re going to show you how our Epic Journey governance works for us over the next two years and beyond.

Stair: Our executive sponsors lead the entire transformation, and they are the last stop for big decisions. They also continually monitor our progress and help keep us on schedule.

Booth: The Executive Steering Committee is made up of 30 leaders from all of our organizations. It includes executive leadership, physicians, nursing revenue cycle compliance, HSIS, and Human Resources. This group will make about 10% of the high-level decisions.

Stair: Next up are our advisory groups. These groups direct a lot of important decisions that will affect users related to documentation and clinical workflows, as well as many technical and revenue cycle processes. The chairs of these advisory groups represent multiple institutions and facilitate about 15% of the decisions that will be made, along with receiving reports from the workgroups.

Booth: The operational workgroups will make the bulk of our decisions – around 75%. There are dozens of clinical and revenue cycle workgroups made up of literally hundreds of leaders from across our various organizations. You can see the wide range of design decisions they will cover related to specific modules. As we build one unified platform, these members are expected to be superusers as well, and they will support their colleagues and disseminate information throughout the process.

Stair: Here’s a good way to keep the governance structure in mind. You can see how the escalation and communication will flow throughout the different groups, with most decisions coming from the operational workgroups.

Booth: And don’t forget our mini specialty content groups, which will provide note templates, order sets, and clinical workflows for our specialty areas at all of our facilities.

Stair: So, now you know where the decisions are coming from during our Epic implementation. We’ll keep you updated on these throughout the whole process. Just know that a lot of people are working on these decisions every day to make Epic as good as it can be, for you and our providers around the state. Stay tuned for more episodes coming soon.