Members of the PeC @ BWHC Clinician Champion Team participate in Epic test drive.

On July 29 and 30, eight members of the Partners eCare (PeC) @ BWHC Clinician Champion Team participated in a Partners eCare “Test Drive” event hosted by PeC. The event was offered in multiple two-hour sessions designed to provide participants with a preview of how the integrated system will work by guiding them through scripted scenarios consisting of basic workflows for an inpatient nurse, inpatient provider and ambulatory provider.

Coordinating the test drive was a significant undertaking spearheaded by the PeC Clinician Engagement Team that required extensive coordination with Epic.

“The Partners eCare system is still under construction,” said Betsy Drucker, physician director, PeC Clinician Engagement Team. “Participants in the test drive needed to understand that they were not seeing the final system, but a work still in progress. Our content team as well as Epic application managers and coordinators were on hand to help participants as they went through the workflows and to provide support and answer questions.”

In the test drive environment, participants were able to experience every day activities, including how to view and input patient history, manage medication, document assessments, place orders, start and finish an admission, and use the Epic Smart Tools function.

“With the test drive, I was given a sense of how I will use Partners eCare in my job,” said Johanna Baldissari, BWHC Clinician Champion, and BWFH nurse practitioner. “While I knew I was still in a testing environment, I came away with a much better understanding of the integration and the tools the system will provide to help me care for my patients.”

“I loved the test drive because it gave me a chance to see firsthand the work that has been done over the past two years,” said Lisa Cole, BWHC Clinician Champion, and BWFH associate chief nurse. “Most of what we have been doing to this point has been ‘snapshots’ of the concepts.  The test drive let me see the full process and I found the system to be fairly intuitive.”

Training is key to the successful implementation of Partners eCare and that became very clear to participants during the test drive.

“The system is easier to maneuver than I originally thought,” said David Brooks, MD, BWHC Clinician Champion, BWH surgeon. “There can be a lot of ‘clicks’ to get where you need to go, and that will take some time to get used to, but in general it is pretty intuitive. For clinicians, taking advantage of the personalization labs in training to set up templates for frequently used tasks will be a tremendous time savings once we go live.”

BWHC will go live with Partners eCare beginning May 30, 2015.

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Article courtesy of Partners eCare.