What has MedShare learned about transforming a visiting nurse organization to a completely paperless system?

It’s about the Client. Set priorities and make decisions based on the potential benefit to patients. It is important not to forget the human aspects of using an Electronic Home Care Record (EHCR).

Get the right people at the table.
Identify changes at an organizational level to operations, documentation, quality, reporting, performance management and the like.  In each of these areas you should break-down the work into processes, and then map them to the staff that are impacted by the change. 

Start Cross-functional teams to allow clinicians and IT specialists to get a detailed view into each other’s worlds—the advantages and the constraints—establishing combined ownership of new processes and ways in which a system could work to support the care delivered to the patient. The combined skills and knowledge of operations, clinical and informatics staff are essential for the design and implementation of the system.

Cater to the caregivers. Clinician leadership is important. Clinician champions play a major role in support and “morale building” for the various specialties. Additionally they bridge the technical and clinical perspectives and provide important communication between the clinicians, the implementation team and other users. Be prepared to support the clinicians and adapt the solution to meet their needs.

Communicate expansively to get everyone on board. Talk and listen to everyone involved and give updates on the implementation at meetings, during discussion forums, in newsletters, on posters, by email and phone messaging. Provide feedback on results. The EHCR will improve the quality of care and outcomes if done right. Let everyone know when it happens and celebrate.

Training is integral to success. Provide in-depth training and build in user experience testing early on to help users gain skills and confidence—and allow the team to validate clinical workflows before the system goes live.

Don’t forget Return on Investment.  Implementing an Electronic Home Care Record solution is major investment and can be disruptive to the organization. Everyone agrees that when done properly, it improves quality, health outcomes and patient safety while reducing errors, number of visits and administrative overhead.  Identify and capture the data necessary to measure health outcomes and correlate this with the cost of providing care.

VON Canada’s eastern region now has 300 nurses on MedShare for BlackBerry.  This “pilot” is the first step toward a fully integrated Electronic Health Record.

Read the press release here.

MedShare announced at the Canadian Home Care Association Conference that the MedShare for BlackBerry multi-lingual version is now available in Quebec. Qualicode, based in Montreal, has integrated the BlackBerry application into their industry leading home health management solution. Qualicode's Quebec customers now have access to an important point of care tool that extends their existing IT investment.

Read the full press release here.