Surviving an EHR launch: The trauma of Go Live

An excerpt from The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age (McGraw-Hill, 2015). The YouTube video opens to show a balding middle-aged man sitting on a stool, strumming a guitar. In a gentle, twangy croon, the man, Robert Schwab, chief quality officer for Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Denton, Texas, sings “The Ballad of Go-Live,” a week-by-week chronicle of what happened when his hospital turned on its electronic health record system in 2012. He set his lyrics to the melody of the Simon and Garfunkel folk ballad “Homeward Bound.” I’m sitting at the nurses’ station, my ticket filed in desperation. Waiting for the help desk guy, to give me something I can try … to get a patient list so I, can finish rounds before I die. On Go Live night, it feels like death. On Go Live night … Somehow, he makes it through Week 1, and the song continues [the tune is now the song’s chorus]: One … at least I logged on. One … I’ve got to slog on. One … I’ve discharged someone. [Mournfully] But I don’t know who. *** The unanticipated consequences of electronic health records begin at the beginning, with a ritual known as “Go Live,” when an entire organization flips a switch and converts from one way of doing work to another. Of course, problematic implementations of large computer systems aren’t limited to healthcare organizations: efforts to install massive new systems have failed famously in th...
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - Category: Journals (General) Authors: Tags: Tech Health IT Source Type: blogs