EHR Change Management Myths
This is the third in a series of excerpts from a recent Arch Collaborative exclusive webinar, hosted by Taylor Davis and featuring Rob Schreiner, MD, President of Wellstar Medical Group.
Taylor Davis:
"Walk us through the next step that, that maybe all of us have missed before in terms of forming a coalition to go tackle these."
Rob Schreiner:
"Right. So if myth number one in change management is, "Change is somebody's job other than the leader." Myth number two would be that, "It's the leader's job to isolate him or herself in a dark room and just ideate." And think, "What does my single brain say is the way to fix the problem?"
The much better way is to put together a team, ideally of individuals who are smarter than us and that represent various dimensions of the problem as well as a successful solution. And so if we go to the next slide, I just have some bright shiny faces here of the team for this particular change effort.
So again, if there are listeners who have just joined we've set about trying to fix primary care, the flow of patients, the scope of practice of the various individuals in a primary care practice, being able to, for the doctor to come in on time, end on time, have all the charts and documentation done, everybody on the team from MA, LPN, RN, all the way up to the doc and APP practicing at top of scope.
So that's the problem to solve and there's all kinds of benefits that come out of it regarding recruitment, retention, a better quality of care and so forth. So these are the faces that represent the powerful coalition. Each one of these folks has a piece of the puzzle to contribute either in understanding the problem or clearly stating the problem - or problems - to be solved or offering in the discovery phase what the solutions are and what sequence those solutions should be played out.
So you see Taylor, we've got clinical informaticists, we've got nursing leaders, we certainly have a physician leader, Dr Goolsby - not only is our value committee chair, but also the lead physician in this particular practice that we piloted this change in and we've got to have a director of nursing because of this experiment goes well in Dr Goolsby's office, we're sure as heck going to want to spread it to other practices and do so rapidly.
And so we need some of those thinkers, the industrial engineers and the spread people in order to anticipate a spreading a successful experiment to the other - and I'm not kidding - 280 sites that we have."