Assess Your NextGen EHR Upgrade Readiness

Key stakeholders have performed a preliminary evaluation of the clinical, business, and technology merits of the upgrade based on information gathered from NextGen.

We have evaluated all of our infrastructure (hardware and software for things like external connections for claims processing, diagnostic equipment interfaces, patient kiosks, HL7 interfaces) against the upgrade requirements for 5.9/8.4, identifying gaps and a roadmap for filling them.

Our infrastructure gap elimination roadmap has been completed in writing including the identification of tools, the identification of other relevant third-party resources, and a project budget.

We have a clear understanding of our people resource capacity/limitations and expertise/unkowns for executing this project in conjunction with preserving fluid day-to-day operations.

Key stakeholders agreed that the upgrade is the right move for the practice and have agreed executing on the upgrade subject to the optimal season for our practice to execute.

We have a preliminary, written master strategy that includes: a practice-wide communications plan, infrastructure gap elimination plan, sandbox (testing) plan, a phased roll-out beginning with a pilot, identification of super-users, and a master timeline.

If the infrastructure gap elimination plan calls for new hardware/software investments, the plan calls for live operation of the new assets for several weeks prior to testing.

Our sandbox plan (within the master strategy) calls for multiple test patient encounters with ALL “in-use” provider workflows

The infrastructure gap elimination plan within the master strategy calls for a stop on all ancillary services and SQL jobs prior to performing the upgrade because database and application files are in flux during an upgrade, ancillary services writing to the database may cause issues later.

We are planning the following activities for post EHR upgrade: Upgrade ancillary services post EHR upgrade (ancillary examples include Rosetta, communication services, auditing), Running clinical data loader and medication updates (some functionality in the new KBM is not available until these utilities are run)