Creating Urgency During EHR Implementation
This is an excerpt from a recent Arch Collaborative exclusive webinar, hosted by Taylor Davis and featuring Rob Schreiner, MD, President of Wellstar Medical Group.
This excerpt discusses how Wellstar Medical Group has used Kotter's 8-Step Model to create a successful EHR deployment.
Taylor Davis:
“Kotter's eight step model, something that anyone who's gone through an MBA or a MHA, program or many of us in our undergraduate, something that we've been exposed to.
So we'd like to talk about applying that healthcare technology and, and so yeah, jump in with, with step number one and, and uh, how do you start out with that all important first step of creating urgency?”
Rob Schreiner:
“Yeah. Great. So I would never assert that Kotter's model is the only model. I would just say that, you know, that it has been validated time and time again in many different industries including health care, and especially in it or EMR change and deployment. And so that's why it's the framework that we use here at Wellstar and we use it for the big, the big scale change.
For example, we used it when we deployed Epic inpatient across six of our 11 hospitals earlier this year and we also use it for what I would consider to be the smaller scale change efforts. And, and it's, it's one of these smaller scale, change efforts that I'd like to tell that story about today using Kotter's model, but giving a very specific example of what this looks like.
So step one is creating urgency and so the urgency that we created, look something like this: that we've got a problem in staff turnover, appointment access, a sub optimal clinical quality and patient and physician experience, in a particular very important discipline. Namely primary care and in particular, adult primary care. I've listed up here, I'm not going to read them to our audience, but I've listed up here numerical results of where we were in October of 2017 and where we decided we wanted to be after we designed and deployed a change in how are our teams, our adult primary care teams interact with the EMR.
Certainly how are doctors interact with the EMR and also, how we should change workflows in the clinic space. And so the importance of the leader creating urgency for the change is so that it directs people's attention and sets a timeline for the problem statement, the discovery section, the design section, the implementation of the change, and we need their discretionary effort.
And so convincing them that this is not just another change effort du jour is really important, particularly on the front end of change management. And that's what's meant by making the case, creating a compelling vision and make it clear of what we intend to do. And probably more importantly why we intend to do it.”