Technically Speaking: A Year of TechSpeak
Believe it or not, you’ve just started reading the 52nd Technically Speaking column! I hope it’s not the first one you’ve ever read. I hope you’ve been a faithful reader from the start and that you’ve learned a bunch of stuff along the way!
2021 brought quite a few changes to Children’s and to IT. The biggest was the opening of the Hubbard Center for Children last August. That monumental project consumed a majority of IT resources for the first two-thirds of the year. Its success was a testament to the tireless efforts and steadfast dedication of every member of our team. We hope that the systems and tools we installed in the Hubbard Center are meeting your needs and helping you provide exceptional care for our patients.
Wiebe Tower, we’re coming for you next…
Elsewhere, we rolled out Office 365, introduced Teams and OneDrive, replaced the infuriating RSA fobs with DUO for controlled substance prescribing, moved from 4- to 10-digit dialing, eliminated about half the pagers from our environment, put monitor data and a dictation microphone on your mobile phones and taught you how to spot a phishing scheme.
In Epic alone, we updated our build to the February 2021 version of the EHR software, integrated Zoom into telehealth visit workflows, assigned problem list entries expiration dates, gave you the ability to provide best practice advisory feedback and revised the darn formula order at least seven times.
And that’s just the stuff I wrote about!
This year, you can expect continued evolution—we’re going to adopt a new surgical case request process, potentially switch provider scheduling platforms, start biannual Epic updates, make clinical pathways easier to find and use, further optimize the Voalte platform, digitize procedural consents, measure the effectiveness of our remote patient monitoring programs, continue streamlining EHR functionality and keep transforming data into useable information.
And with every change, you can expect to see another column right here, telling you what you need to know when you need to know it.
Thanks for reading and for all you do!