As healthcare providers, the work is complex – links in a chain, each important, each small detail impacts everything after. It’s the people on the front line, in the middle of any care delivery process that know this best. The next step in our HealthONE journey is right around the corner. In August and September, the team will hold 264 ‘workflow sessions’ with the people directly involved in each key process so we can, if you will….get into the weeds, look under rocks, consider the details and the options as we build our electronic medical record (EMR).

It is a lot of sessions, but we do a lot of work — complex, interdependent work, right?

Each invite session includes the primary stakeholders of a given process…or step in that process. Each session builds upon the previous work with a goal to have a workflow and process design that reflects our experience, our reality, the capability of the Epic tool and the future state we envision.

So why should you care?

If you are invited, you are clearly not alone — you are an important link in the chain, without you the chain holds nothing. Not invited — you may think you’re lucky, you may question why not — either way you should know who is representing your work and make sure they understand the one, deep, hidden process clue only you hold. And, if nothing else, understand and appreciate the complexity of working toward our objective — one record, one place, one reason…you.

All UConn HealthONE information, documents, governance and education are now available on the project website, accessible by the icon on the top bar of the UConn Health Express. Check back often, and remember, in some way, this takes all of us to succeed.

By R. Dirk Stanley, Chief Medical Information Officer

Disclaimer: The modern “information age” may not really be so modern. It actually started about 35,000 years ago in a cave in Sulawesi, Indonesia. Some of our earliest human ancestors made cave paintings to share information with other humans and – voila – Homo sapiens thrived. Since then, information sharing among humans has grown exponentially, and in the last 150 years, health care leaders such as Florence Nightingale and John Snow have used this information to help save lives. Indeed, documentation, information management, and health care share a long tradition.

Therefore, as a history-loving doctor and technologist, I’m very proud to report the HealthONE project at UConn Health is now officially underway!

The HealthONE project is a 22-month journey to replace our various current clinical systems with a single, unified electronic medical record (EMR) from the Epic Corporation in Verona, Wisconsin. This ambitious and forward-thinking project will bring together large numbers of our staff, both clinical and administrative, to help decide as a team: What do we want clinical care for our patients to look like in the future?

Not only will the project break down barriers between doctors, nurses, and other clinical and administrative staff – it gives us a real opportunity to combine the best practices of the past with the most recent evidence-based research. New clinical decision support tools will help improve and streamline care, while new analysis tools will help drive research and identify opportunities we have yet to discover.

Will all this bring change to our organization? You bet. But the change is going to be great. Just imagine the clarity, efficiency, and harmony of being able to find the information you want, at the right time, to guide the best decisions. The HealthOne project is going to help us design that future together, for the benefit of patients, families, and clinical providers.

To make this happen, UConn Health has now assembled a dedicated technical team who will be working very hard with clinical and administrative leaders over the next 22 months. They will collect information from our many doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and other clinical and administrative staff, and build the configuration and processes needed to break down barriers, create new opportunities, and bring HealthOne to our patients, staff, and community.

As a chief medical information officer, I’ll be part of both the technical and clinical teams, helping to guide the project to our go-live. It’s rewarding work, with a great outcome in our future. Until we get there together, I’ll keep an eye out for more opportunities to show you what one place, one record, one reason is all about. You.