Implementing systems doesn’t mean much these days if they remain data islands unto themselves, but far too many teams rely on the drawn-out iterative processes of trial and error to get their interfaces created and tested. With so many connections at play, your organization must find a way to get leaner and do more with less. We’re sponsoring an educationally focused webinar on this topic. You’ll hear from CIOs who have blasted away key bottlenecks in integration, leaving them able to deliver faster and better interfaces by focusing on the entire lifecycle.
CIO Panelists
The presenters will be Jorge Grillo, CIO, Canton-Potsdam Hospital, and Cathy Crowley, CIO, Columbia Memorial Hospital.
Jorge Grillo wrote a 17-part series for HealthSystemCIO.com on a Meditech 6.0 upgrade. Part 10 included interface development and testing. He made some excellent points: “The lesson learned for us is that when we upgrade the interfaces to 6.x, we need to TEST, TEST, TEST before any go-live. The military has a saying, “The more you bleed in training the less you bleed on combat.” Getting things corrected prior to go-live is critical to ensuring a smooth user experience.”
Cathy Crowley was featured in a 3-part interview on HealthSystemCIO.com. The first interview covered interfacing, and in fact, Columbia Memorial has tripled interfacing over the past 2 years. She talked about the impact of solid planning: “We did have to upgrade all three systems this past spring, so we upgraded Meditech, eClinicalWorks to 9.0, and even Allscripts. So that was a challenge. In some ways I call it the Big Bang theory because we all did all three very close together. The advantage of doing that is we really did the interface testing pretty much at one time, as compared to if we had done one in the fall and then waited four months and did another in the spring. You’re going to be retesting those interfaces all over again.”
Their messages: it’s all about the scoping, planning, and testing.
Register Today
This promises to be a terrific educational webinar, with CIOs who’ve been in trenches with interfacing. Sign up for the live webinar, which will be held on May 24, 2012, at 1 pm Eastern. If you’re unable to attend the live event, you can register and you’ll receive an email as soon as the archive is ready.