EPM Core Group Minutes

Here is a link to the EPM Core Team minutes from today.

EPM Core Group Meeting

This is a reminder that there is an EPM Core Group meeting tomorrow morning at 8am in the dental conference room. Please bring your training binders as well as your course list so that we can all share how far we have progressed in the training. See you there!

Employee of the Year

Voting for employee of the year for 2007 will take place during the all staff meeting on Friday February 8th. The nominees are each monthly winner from 2007. Previous winners were Hans Dethlefs 2005 and Carmen Alcazar 2006. Vote early and vote often!

January Sharon Herrera WIC Clerk
February Regina Fruge Social Work
March Kelly Hammett Patient Support
April Maria Cortes Health Assistant Supervisor
May Amber VanKirk Nurse
June Susana Urbano Nurse
July Grace Sourile WIC Dietitian
August Leah Jorgensen Provider
September Alicia Lagunas Patient Support
October Sam Portillo Health Assistant
November Claudia Rios Patient Support
December Sara Cervantes Cabriales Front Desk

Staff Retreat this Thursday

There will be an all staff retreat this Thursday in the Brandeis ballroom. Breaksfast will be served at 7:30am. Please get there no later than 7:45 so that we can get started on time. We will all stay in the ballroom for various fun activities until 9:30am when the providers will depart for Plattsmouth. Everyone else will stay here for more fun activities until 11am when the nurses will go to Plattsmouth to join up with the providers.
All of us left here will then have an old school pot luck in the lunch room and conference room downstairs. Don't try to bring a 6-pack of diet coke or $5 to this party. I am hungry for some good home cooking. Break out your best family recipe and we will see you there.

*Here are some pictures from the 2006 Harvest Potluck

Suzie's Dog

Suzie's dog Chewy is a 2 1/2 y.o pomeranian, he likes to go out in the snow and make snow angels. He is currently single and looking for girlfriend. Send offers to findadateforchewy@suzieshouse.com.

E-learning web site

For those of you on the core teams who are working on your e-learning and are having trouble remembering the web site link you can click here to log on.

EHR Core Group Announced

As I mentioned in a previous post, the EHR Project will have two core implementation teams. There will be a team for the Practice Management part of the program and a team for the Health Record part of the program.

I am happy to announce the members of the EHR (Electronic Health Record) Core Team. Please do not read anything into any specific person's inclusion on this team or exclusion from this team. This is just a group of people with special skill sets that will be assisting in the setup of the system and who will be experiencing some online training before the main group. We are very fortunate in that we have many areas of our organization where there are lots of extremely qualified people and we had to pick one. We will still be needing help from everyone and you may be asked to attend one or more of these core group meetings based on what we expect the topic of the day to be. When we have a date and time for the kickoff meeting we will let everyone involved know.

EHR Core Team
Kris McVea - Provider
Hans Dethlefs - Provider
Michelle Linbo - Data Coordinator (starts 2/11/08)
Celia Blizzard - Nursing
Nikki Horton-Brown - Provider
Sarah Dworak - Operations
Rebecca Gil - HA/Lab
Veronica Martinez-Loya - Nursing
Jeremy Holt - IT
Courtney Allen - Provider
Alicia Lagunas - PT Support
Layne Prest - Provider, Behavioral Health
Therese Hennessy - Provider
Joel Dougherty - Operations

Thanks to all of these people for agreeing to be a part of this team!

Cass Family Medicine in the news

Our newest clinic, Cass Family Medicine was featured in the Plattsmouth Journal last week. The article was very well written and profiles the clinic during it's first week of operation. Thanks to everyone who contributed to getting this site up and running. Click here to read the article.

Denver Site Visits

Yesterday Hans, Kris, Andrea, Celia, and I went to Denver to visit two community health centers, Metro Community Provider Network and Clinica Campesina. The purpose of the visits was to talk to the leadership teams about their experiences with both redesign and with implementing and EHR. We were also able to take a tour of one clinic site for each of these organizations. The tours are so useful because they give you a chance to see the redesign concepts that you heard them talking about in action. We saw a lot of new and exciting things and also were told to prepare for the amount of work that implementing an EHR represents. Each of these clinics were very generous with their time and we hope to be able to pass that gift on to other clinics in the future who may want to come here to see the great work that our staff does here every day.

On the kind of funny side, I locked my keys in my truck at the airport, left my Ipod in the rental car in Denver, and had to sit next to Hans for both lunch and dinner. All trying experiences but I got through them. They say what doesn't kill you only makes you stronger.

EPM meeting today

We had our first EPM core team meeting today. You can read a copy of the minutes here. The next meeting will be wed. 1/30/07 in the dental conference room @ 8:00AM.

Hectors Dog

Here's some pix of Hector's dog Max. His parents call him Chato though. This is one of the 4 puppies that Lupe Moreno's dog from patient support had. Alicia Lagunas has one, Veronica Ibarra has the albino of the litter, and Lupe kept the fourth. I think its wierd that Hector's house and dog are all black and white with no color but don't tell him I said so.

EPM Core Group Meeting

This is a reminder that the EPM core team will meet tomorrow morning (Tuesday the 22nd) from 8:30 to 9:30 in the dental conference room. We will be going over the e-learning web site during a conference call with NextGen.

Core EHR Project Teams

The EHR Project will have two core implementation teams. There will be a team for the Practice Management part of the program and a team for the Health Record part of the program. The practice management part of NextGen will be taking the place of MDServe. This module takes care of the patient demographics, scheduling, and billing.

I am happy to announce the members of the EPM (Electronic Practice Management) Core Team. Please do not read anything into any specific person's inclusion on this team or exclusion from this team. This is just a group of people with special skill sets that will be assisting in the setup of the system and who will be experiencing some online training before the main group. We are very fortunate in that we have many areas of our organization where there are lots of extremely qualified people and we had to pick one. We will still be needing help from everyone and you may be asked to attend one or more of these core group meetings based on what we expect the topic of the day to be.

Our first meeting will be this Tuesday January 22nd at 8:30 in the third floor conference room. We will talk about the mission of the group and also have a WebEx call with the NextGen training department to go over the online training.

EPM Core Team

1. Carmen Alcazar - Appointment Scheduling
2. Celia Blizzard - Nursing
3. Sara Cabriales - Patient Registration
4. Hans Dethlefs - Provider
5. Joel Dougherty - Operations
6. Sarah Dworak - Operations
7. Ana Gudino - Provider Scheduling
8. Jeremy Holt - IT
9. Alicia Lagunas - PT Support
10. Cassie Lawson - Billing (Custom Computing)
11. Hector Uribe - Operations

Thanks to all of these people for agreeing to be a part of this team!

OneWorld in the News

Our Cass Family Medicine clinic in Plattsmouth was featured in the business section of the Omaha World Herald today. The clinic is now open and seeing patients. Their number is 296-2345 and the fax there is 296-2353. Click on this link to read the story.

Oscar Holiday Card

If you didn't know, my dog's name is Oscar. He is a 3 year old Lab/Pit Bull mix. Click on the picture to see his holiday picture. Both his mother and I are very proud.

Send me pictures and info about your pets and I may share them here as well.

More about NextGen and an online demo

If you want to learn more about NextGen you can go to http://www.nextgen.com/. There is information there about their company and also an online demo of their EHR software. If you can't wait to see more of the system that OneWorld is implementing then go there and check it out.

Meet Jeremy

Does everyone know who Jeremy Holt is?? Jeremy is our new IT/Network Coordinator. His extension is 111 he has been an excellent addition to our team. A pretty good chunk of the EHR project falls on Jeremy's shoulders. He is responsible for ordering, installing, and configuring all of the new computers and servers that will run the EHR. His office is across the hall from mine and he is very friendly so feel free to stop by and say hi.

Jeremy has spent the last week poring over specifications from NextGen for the servers that we need to purchase to run the EHR. He has been putting together models of different systems, negotiating with four different vendors, and making recommendations to me as to which model we should select. We hope to have a decision tomorrow on what servers we will buy. They have to be installed at our site by February 1st. This is a tight deadline but if anyone can do it Jeremy can.

Electronic Health Record Overview

EHR stands for Electronic Health Record. An EHR is a computer program designed to taker the place of a patients paper chart. The idea is that anywhere where there is a computer connected to the network you can pull up a patient's chart instantly. The reasons to implement an EHR are to improve quality of care for the patients, increase patient safety, increase efficiency, and reduce redundant work.

18 months ago Andrea convened a committee consisting of Dr. McVea, Dr. D., Andrea, and myself. Our task was to search for and evaluate all options for an EHR system. We sent requests to as many EHR companies as we could find. Dr. D sat through a demo with each of the companies that responded and then if he thought a company's program was good then he had Dr. McVea and I look at the demo too. The list was narrowed during this process of demos and also gathering info about the products from others in our industry. Ultimately we narrowed the list to two, NextGen and GE Centricity and visited health centers who were already using them so that we could see them in action.

NextGen was our favorite so we had them come to OW in September (as I remember it) and do demos for the entire staff. Staff response was extremely positive regarding the product and we decided that NextGen was our first choice. We began negotiations and finally reached an agreement on price and terms with NextGen just days before the end of the year.

This is a really long post. I will try to keep them shorter in the future. Now you know the background on how we came to decide that NextGen would be our product of choice for our EHR system.

Welcome

Welcome to the OneWorld Herald blog, the electronic counterpart to the OneWorld staff newsletter. If you are reading this then you must be at least a little bit interested in keeping up with the events at OneWorld. The purpose of this blog is to be able to share information about what is going on at OW in a manner that people can choose to read if they are interested. My writing style will be informal as I hope to spend time sharing thoughts but not a lot of time composing them in a formal memo, email, or newsletter article.

The idea for this blog came to me on my drive home tonight from the Cheesecake Factory where I had dinner with Sara C., Marcos, and Elva. We were belatedly celebrating the victory by the front desk in the first annual Halloween room decorating contest. Much of our dinner conversation was devoted to the theme for Halloween 2008 and how we will defend our title. Anyway, back to the blog idea. I was driving home (1 hour) and mulling over a conversation that I had with Andrea earlier in the day re: the fact that we needed to make sure as we embarked on the Electronic Health Record (referred to as EHR for the rest of time) that we keep everyone informed of our progress and that we gather input from as many people as possible during the process.

I hope to keep the general mood of this blog light, to update frequently, to occasionally have some guest contributors, and to create a place where people can keep up with what is going on in our organization.

Thanks for stopping by and please check back often. If you like something you read, have questions, or feedback please let me know. If you have a question about a work item that I discuss here please ask your supervisor or me.