HI 6001 Special Topics in Health Informatics: Applied EHR Implementation

This summer (2013) Texas Children’s Hospital and Clinics (TCH) will be going through a major upgrade to their Epic EHR. The goal of this course is to introduce students to the complex, socio-technical process of implementing a new EHR, or in this case, a major system upgrade. In addition to reading “Electronic Health Records: Challenges in Design and Implementation”, a new book of selected articles describing various aspects of EHR implementation and use, students will be expected to:

Prerequisites

Introduction to EHRs or equivalent course.

Additional Information

Course Goals

1. Attend the Texas Children’s Hospital EHR orientation class: an 8 hour-long course taught by TCH employees.
   • Learn about the TCH EMR environment from the EMR production support team – 2 hours
2. Work with one or more clinics to help them prepare for the go-live: 6-8 hours/week
3. During the 30 days (4 weeks) following go-live (scheduled to start ….), spend 10-15 hours/week onsite at the clinic helping triage EHR-related issues to the appropriate TCH employee.
   • Triage issue
   • Log issue with Command Center
   • Provide end of day de-brief to implementation team leads
4. Keep an on-line journal of activities and reflections of what you did during each session in the clinic.
5. Answer all questions on the 9 SAFER EHR self-assessment guides (approximately 160 questions) based on your work at the clinics.
6. Write a 5-7 page report that describes:
   • Setting – including a short clinic description
   • Timeline of events – including aspects of hardware and software configuration, user training, and key post go-live activities
   • Overview of the findings from the SAFER guides
   • Current status – including an assessment of the go-live process
7. Create and deliver a 20 minute presentation to the TCH EHR implementation team that summarized your written report.  Answer questions.