Cherwell Product Demo
Tuesday, March 06, 2012
11:00AM ET / 8:00AM PT
Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center Establishes Effective IT Support Triage
by, Jarod Greene and Ben Flam
Introduction
DHMC chose Epic Systems' (Epic) EpicCare suite, which included 14 modules. This was an $80 million initiative, requiring considerable time and resources for implementation, and was set for roll out on 1 April 2011. To support EHR services, DHMC first considered using a SharePoint-based solution for EHR incident, tracking and reporting purposes. However, through testing, it was determined that SharePoint would not meet requirements related to issue workflow, reporting capabilities and collaboration extensibility. In a separate IT project, DHMC had recently replaced its homegrown IT incident management solution with an off-the-shelf IT service management (ITSM) solution (Cherwell Software).
Having completed that deployment in October 2010, considerations were made shortly after to leverage Cherwell for support of EpicCare. DHMC needed to test Cherwell's extensibility quickly. A clinical transformation team of 65 members was already in place to facilitate the EpicCare rollout (branded as eD-H), and Cherwell was piloted for support of Epic Willow, an in-patient pharmacy module that was set for deployment prior to eD-H. By 22 January 2011, all Willow-related data was entered into Cherwell, and the module was effectively supported. Due to the success of supporting Willow, DHMC executive leadership decided that Cherwell would fully support the eD-H go-live. By December 2010, Cherwell (branded as Dartmouth-Hitchcock Service Management) was implemented into production.
The Challenge
With the solution in place, DHMC was faced with determining the appropriate postimplementation support structure to triage issues in an effective and efficient manner. Two IT service support administrators were given to the clinical transition team. These individuals gathered requirements and requested the appropriate reconfigurations for Cherwell. This required careful planning and departmental collaboration among executive leadership, clinicians and the IT organization. After identifying the support requirements, the roles and responsibilities for each support level were defined, enabling IT support to optimize skilled resources appropriately.
