UHN went live with Epic on June 4, 2022, achieving the mission of a safe and effective transition to a new health information system (HIS) meeting the organization's medical, regulatory and legal requirements.
Since then, cross-functional teams of working group members, application analysts and principal educators, have been working hard to make post go-live changes to Epic, addressing functionality requests, adding new features and making fixes to system issues.
Accompanying these changes have been hundreds of communications, each one explaining the specific system updates and where to find more information.
Keeping up with all the changes can be daunting.
"Working with Epic has been great, but trying to stay on top of all the technical changes takes time," says Gabriel Oh, a nurse practitioner in General Internal Medicine at Toronto General Hospital. "Falling behind or being unaware of such changes can present challenges with using the system."
Starting this week, UHN Digital is offering a solution.
Beginning on Tuesday, May 9, a twice-monthly email –
Epic Features and Fixes Bulletin – will support Epic users with change awareness and adoption. Regularly scheduled and consolidated, it will outline the non-urgent changes occurring in the system.
"Following go-live, our mission was to get information about Epic changes out to staff as quickly as possible," says Chelsea King, Director of Change Management at UHN Digital.
"That approach was necessary to help members of TeamUHN transition to the vital new HIS system, but we know that this led to disjointed and unpredictable communication at times.
"With the new
Epic Features and Fixes Bulletin, users will be able to rely upon a consistent and standardized source of information about changes in the system. We'll prepare a consolidated summary of all changes organized by Epic application and share it on a regular basis, in advance of those changes appearing in the system."
Benefits of the
Epic Features and Fixes Bulletin include:
- A more controlled release of non-urgent features and fixes, consistently accompanied by supporting communication and training resources in an easily accessible bulletin.
- A centrally stored and searchable repository of past changes available on the
Epic@UHN site.
- An expedited process for urgent fixes will continue to be used, for exceptions to the twice monthly update.
"Moving towards this regular cycle represents UHN's continued progress toward stabilization and our transition to operations," Chelsea says. "We hope that the new bulletin helps to enhance TeamUHN's interactions with Epic," says Chelsea.
For Gabriel, knowing that information will be consistently available is an important step on UHN's continued journey to operationalization.
"I think the bulletin will have a tremendously positive impact on TeamUHN," he says. "Knowing that clinicians and care teams will be able to spend less time tracking down information and more time focused on their patient's well-being will benefit the entire UHN community."
