Are you scheduled to implement CPOE in your ED Department or your inpatient care areas? Have you recently reviewed your base clinical systems to better support your nurses and physicians with electronic order entry? Have you implemented new enhancements available within your current release? If you answered "No" to one or more of these questions, read on!

Collaborative Effort
When looking ahead to your health care organization's implementation of Physician Care Manager (PCM), there are many areas which need to be reviewed prior to physician electronic ordering. It is important that optimization of certain processes and dictionaries take place and are addressed as a multidisciplinary team. This collaborative effort should include, but is not limited to, representatives from each of the following areas: Pharmacy, Nursing, Ancillaries, Physicians, and IT. This is not just an IT project, but rather a project which needs input from each of the associated clinical departments.

Project Management
In order for this collaborative team to be able to work most efficiently, it is important to elect a Project Manager. You may find it necessary to have leaders for each component. There are many moving parts during this 6-8 month 'pre-implementation' phase, and these leaders would have the responsibility of keeping everyone on track. The more optimization done in the time period preceding your PCM delivery, the less bumps to encounter down the road.

What You Can Do Now
Once you reach your PCMII delivery date, you will receive your software, start implementation with your PCM Specialist, with the goal being to stay on track to meet your Go-LIVE date(s). Laying down the groundwork for this implementation is what you can work on prior to delivery: process mappings and Pharmacy, Nursing, and Order Entry optimizations. During implementation, your organization will be able to focus most attention on the development of your PCM dictionaries and will only have to readdress the other applications minimally.

Physician Champions
Healthcare organizations which have been successful with this pre-implementation optimization approach have used a project plan to track these projects. Many times, items listed out on this plan strike up other good conversations, and many 'What if' questions, which start those discussions early on. These successful organizations have also included their physician champion(s) in these discussions.

Areas To Focus On
Some larger areas which are good to focus on at an early stage include but are not limited to: Order Set development and governance, medication management and the Pharmacy Drug Dictionary, Order Entry procedures, allergy management, Medication Reconciliation and Clinical Decision Support. As you think through each of these areas you can see they all have an impact on several departments of your organization, as well as patient safety and satisfaction.

Tutorials
To help you get started, we have created several self running optimization tutorials and checklists. We recommend you first determine who the key players are going to be during this pre-implementation phase. Then, you should schedule a time to review these tutorials and work through the checklists. Do not underestimate the amount of time this will take.

These tutorials are located on the Advanced Clinicals webpage: http://www.meditech.com/AdvancedClinicalResources/pages/onlinetut.htm.

Continued Rollout
If you have implemented CPOE at your organization in some part already and are looking to further rollout this functionality, now is a good time for a quick review to ensure the ancillary clincials are set up optimally. Of course, depending on where you are with your advanced clinical implementations, you may have already addressed some of the areas mentioned in these presentations. However, it doesn't hurt to review where you currently stand and what still needs to be done. This will help in achieving a continued successful roll-out of the advanced clinical functionality within your MEDITECH HCIS.