Background: Academic Medical Center
Our client is a large Academic Medical Center (AMC) in the northeast who is nationally recognized for clinical-excellence – breaking new ground in research, training the next generation of healthcare leaders, and delivery science-driven, patient-centered care. They are ranked among the top hospitals nationally and regionally by U.S. News & World Report. For more than 100 years, they have been innovating new treatments, new procedures and new approaches to patient care, producing stellar outcomes and raising the bar for medical centers in the region and around the world.
Academic Medical Center realizes a 36% overall cost reduction with Optimum Healthcare IT.
Challenges
After implementing the Epic Electronic Health Record (EHR) system, the academic medical center was facing a limited operational support budget that negatively impacted support quality, end-user satisfaction, and application team morale. The restricted budget has led to insufficient staffing capacity, forcing the team to prioritize their time working on an underestimated volume of required maintenance, upgrades, and break-fix incidents. There is no capacity to tackle the high-value system enhancements & process improvement opportunities that were promised during the implementation. Their teams are burnt out and understaffed, leading to high turn-over. Replacing lost talent is difficult, with a 12-18 month learning curve and limited local experienced talent to source. There are no well-defined processes, a lack of documentation, and off-the-books work that is leading to inconsistency, a lack of transparency in productivity as well as accountability among the application team. Additionally, the limited capacity has forced the organization to rely on expensive consultants to help with expansion to newly acquired sites.
. . . the work performed by [Optimum] has allowed the Ambulatory team to focus on other non-routine requests rather than on this task . . ..
Director, Epic Applications
Solution
Drawing from our vast Epic experience, Optimum Healthcare IT presented the academic medical center with a strategy that encompassed maintenance and support managed services. Beginning with an onsite assessment to identify routine/templated work items, Optimum documented processes, and implemented process improvements as the work transitioned to the Optimum team. With an approach that is scalable up or down, depending on the client's needs, our Epic application managed services team took over 30 maintenance-related workflows, completed the work and sent it back to the client completed within the service standards. The goal of this engagement was to increase the overall value of the client’s support spend.
