Expert Panel Discussion on The Road to CPOE

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Edward Koschka

Our help desk is not equipped in its current state to meet the demands of CPOE deployment. As a result, we created medical informatics consultants that are on-site or available by phone to assist physicians.

In addition, we have designated super users in each area that can help physicians and clinicians. The expense was a concern at first, but we feel it is a key success factor.

David Fiser

Our help desk is also not equipped to handle CPOE deployment in its current state. We embarked on a lean initiative to streamline workflow and enhance the help desk to adequately support the increased demands for the CPOE initiative. Those changes or enhancements are currently under way in parallel to the CPOE project and will be in place prior to the go-live next year.

Lee Carmen

For our help desk, our biggest challenge was recruiting staff with EMR expertise who can be available 24/7. We did not consider outsourcing solutions for our environment, as we felt it would be an excellent long-term solution for us to have a large number of well-trained support technicians.

Dave Baumgardner

Currently, our help desk is not ready to support CPOE. It is my opinion that outsourcing solutions may not be what is needed. I think it is more on-site, physician-related, which will require the support function to be local. We are looking at adding a second shift to our help desk operation and also will make our physician applications analyst available to be the first tier of support during the day. We have been very successful in the past with the development and deployment of super users, and we plan to take advantage of this approach as well. We also are reviewing a new help desk software solution.