UBMD

While UBMD made a major investment in its electronic health record (EHR) upgrade this June, purchasing $380,000 in new equipment, the other half of the EHR implementation story is the dedicated group of people working behind the scenes to train UBMD staff and prepare the Allscripts health record system to interface with UBMD's existing practice management and hospital-based health record systems.

The EHR core project team is made up of three staff members from the practice plan, two executives from UBMD, two "physician champions" and an external consultant. The physician champions—Peter Winkelstein, MD, chief of pediatrics at Women and Children's Hospital of Buffalo, and Pamela Reed, MD, medical director for UBMD Internal Medicine—are both tech-savvy EHR experts who understand the Allscripts system with the physician's perspective in mind.

Systems analyst Francine Spinella and office manager Therese Aquilina (pictured), both of Internal Medicine, are well acquainted with Allscripts, having used it at their offices for more than two years. In June, Spinella, Aquilina, Reed, Tak Nobumoto (director of operations), Rick Fusani (IT coordinator for UB Pediatric Associates) and the rest of the core team traveled to Chicago to become "super-users"—trainers who train others at UBMD how to use the new version of Allscripts.

Spinella says they spent an "intense but very interesting" two weeks learning the upgrade before returning to Buffalo to start testing and using it. "It's taken many hours on top of my normal work load to educate myself, but it's been a great learning opportunity for all of us."

Spinella and other IT staff already know Allscripts' back-end features (security, access and administration), while clinical staff like Aquilina, who is an RN, have mastered the front-end functions that have helped improve clinical and office work flow. Together, they are collaborating to train each other on both.

Super-users' reactions to the new Allscripts v.11 have been very positive so far. They say the modules are cleaner looking and easier to use for searching data and setting up and tracking referrals, billing, and communications between patients and physicians.

Spinella's favorite feature: the system's toolbar now works like a computerized Rolodex, displaying an alpha list of everything from medicines and charts to problem lists, past history and vitals. Physicians and coding staff both like the pre-loaded lists of ICD9 codes, which can be programmed to display by specialty.

In August, the core team began training Internal Medicine and UB Pediatric Associates staff on the new Allscripts, with more practice plans to follow in February 2010 and beyond.