C-Suite Analytics During an EHR Go-Live

You’re about to go live with your shiny new EHR solution after months of design, build, test and training. Everyone is so excited about the change! But how will you monitor the progress of your go-live? How can you benchmark post-live performance relative to pre-live performance to measure success and identify pain points? And how can you know – quantitatively – that your organization is post-live stable?

Organizations normally prepare go-live reports, scorecards and dashboards to answer such questions. The metrics in the reporting tools they use are primarily go-live specific and reported at least once a day during the first few weeks (and months) after they “flip the switch.” There will be meetings held among different levels of leadership to review these metrics, make decisions upon them and take action accordingly.

Throughout the organization, there are differences in areas of interest, so identifying the appropriate combination of data for your audience is crucial. Executives focus on big picture direction as well as critical operational areas. Given the limited amount of time during a go-live, continually reviewing a laundry list of metrics is unrealistic. Therefore, a C-suite daily dashboard should be concise and contain only those key measurements.

So what metrics should your organization consider including in your C-suite dashboard?

Impact Advisors surveyed a few of the nation’s largest health systems that recently went live to help answer this question. While the scale of our survey was not big enough to do a robust statistical analysis, we did find strong patterns and similarities among the areas of interests that C-suite members monitor during their EHR go-lives.

Since each organization has its own unique reporting capabilities and preferences, we would like to introduce the concept of “focus areas” to present functional bands of high interest. Below are the focus areas (and corresponding metric examples) our research discovered that health systems’ C-suites monitor during go-lives. Please click the magnifying glass at the bottom right for our complete table.

Finally, we recommend you prepare for go-live reporting as early as possible to collect your pre-live data and identify threshold values. Those data will serve as crucial baselines during go-live and help C-suite members monitor performance more accurately.

If your organization is approaching that transformational milestone in the near future, we hope you find this information useful.

Need assistance with Analytics? Contact Kent Gray at kent.gray@impact-advisors.com.