Virtua was implementing the Siemens Soarian Clinical Information System (CIS) at its Voorhees hospital, a 295-bed regional medical center in the heart of Camden County in Southern New Jersey. Keeping in line with its focus on continued process improvements to enhance the patient care experience and digitize the healthcare system for the future, Virtua wanted to ensure that the technology was live at the its existing hospital before transitioning to a replacement facility in May 2011. A key element of the CIS implementation included computerized physician order entry (CPOE). Virtua identified the need to support the Director of Medical Informatics and complement the current internal team with additional external resources knowledgeable and experienced with CPOE implementation and ongoing support – in particular around program management and nursing and physician informatics.
THE SOLUTION
Aspen Advisors was engaged to provide CPOE program management and clinical informatics expertise to support the workflow design, order set review and design, and change management process and provide overall implementation support between the nurses, physicians, and IS. The initial engagement was limited to the Voorhees facility but laid the foundation for CPOE deployment at Virtua’s remaining three inpatient facilities. Engagement objectives included:
- Managing the project roadmap and work plan;
- Advising the CIS program team and end users and providing best practice expertise as it related to CPOE;
- Facilitating and leading CPOE CIS working sessions inclusive of physicians and non physicians and ensuring a smooth and effective integration of the clinician population into the overarching CIS program;
- Creating linkage to the physician CIS governance structure to ensure that there was regular, transparent communication of project status, changes, and issues impacting the project’s timeline, scope, and budget;
- Serving as nursing and physician clinical content consultants for the CIS project specific to CPOE;
- Working directly with hospital clinicians and ensuring there was tight integration between their workflows and expectations with the actual application design in the Siemens Soarian product;
- Playing a lead role in physician process and workflow analysis, assessment of current and future state workflow needs, and the prioritization of tasks to meet internal deadlines according to the project work plan;
- Providing testing support for order sets and sentences;
- Leading the design, documentation, and rollout of the training material and plan;
- Assessing and developing recommendations and a strategy around physician device usage, adoption, and rollout planning; and
- Documenting, communicating, and playing a lead role in resolving issues that arose during the course of the engagement.
CPOE was successfully deployed at the Voorhees facility well in advance of the new replacement facility opening in May 2011. The CPOE rollout included nearly 100 order sets and included the following patient care units in the organization: general medical surgical, behavioral health, pediatrics, adult and pediatric critical care, mother baby units and nurseries, neonatal intensive care, inpatient pre-operative, and the emergency department.
