Box Butte General Hospital began the implementation process for transitioning the Electronic Health Record (EHR) software to Meditech Expanse in March 2022. This transition comes after years of working with Centriq. An Electronic Health Record (EHR) is an electronic version of a patient’s medical history, that is maintained by the provider over time, and includes all of the key clinical data relevant to that patient’s care under a particular provider. EHRs are the next step in the continued progress of healthcare that can strengthen the relationship between patients and providers. The data, and the timeliness and availability of it, will enable providers to make better decisions and provide better care for our community. To live by the mission to lead and innovate in healthcare delivery and community wellness, BBGH employed Meditech to support providing great care to patients.
From September 20 – 22, the Meditech and BBGH Meditech project team executed a mock live event. There were 13 Meditech specialists on campus working with the BBGH superusers. A superuser is someone identified within the organization who is trained to understand the new system and best practice workflows. A superuser is someone the BBGH team can look to for guidance and training. The project team selected several different patient scenarios from the current Centriq system and ran the scenarios through the Meditech Expanse system. Scenarios were pulled from old records. The mock live event is imperative to the transition to ensure the new system is interconnected the way it needs to be as well as charges and claims link correctly.
In the months leading up to the mock live event, the BBGH project team worked closely with the Meditech team to input BBGH’s information into the Meditech system. The information that is input into the system is referred to as dictionaries. The BBGH project team produced several dictionaries such as resources, locations, facilities, doctors, referrals, order, pharmaceuticals, supplies, procedures, exams, labs, etc. Once all of the dictionaries were produced, Meditech became involved. Together, the teams customized content based on workflows and the industry’s best practices. Now that BBGH is post-mock live, fine tuning will take place based on what the teams found. Testing of patient scenarios will continue during the coming months, and then end-user training will be completed before the new system goes live.
BBGH is taking detailed and cautious steps to test the system and verify it works with all the different scenarios seen throughout the organization. Also important to the go-live is ensuring staff is comfortable in the new system. It is imperative that the system is flowing and working properly, so that it is able to provide great care to patients.
The original go-live date of November 1 has been postponed and a new date is yet to be determined.
