EHR Governance

Organizations spend large amounts of money to purchase, deploy and optimize their EHRs. They are not plug-n-play systems. This requires commitment to an ongoing improvement cycle that, when done well, responds to the people and process as well as the platform. When not done well, could result in complete failure of the system costing the organization thousands of dollars.

In early 2014 the User Experience Team (UXP) at Dignity Health was invited to reorganize the Organization's EHR Governance. This request came on the heels of provider complaints about slow change request turn-around-time, low throughput and poor process transparency. At that time, approximately 60 change request were being released into the live environment on a quarterly basis and it was not uncommon for a change request to take over a year from the time it was submitted to the time it was finally seen by the end user within the EHR. This was compounded by a lack of tools for tracking a change request's lifecycle. This resulted in provider apathy and a pervasive sentiment that EHR Governance was a black hole.

That core User Experience Team, who make up the author team for this book is comprised of key stakeholders who manage EHR governance processes end-to-end on a daily basis. Their foundational premise has always been that governance done right speeds up change and leads to a positive User Experience.

This book is structured to be practical and pragmatic. It begins with how to articulate a clear vision to organizational leaders so they can champion strong EHR governance both theoretically and financially. The book concludes with a commitment to ongoing improvement and refinement - Governing Governance. Based on more than 5 years of ongoing refinement at Dignity Health (now CommonSpirit Health), this book shares processes that can scale to small and large organizations alike. It also calls out critical lessons learned to help the reader avoid the same mistakes and achieve measurable improvement more rapidly.