Standford Hospital and Clinics

In order to implement any IT solution in an organization it is very important to make sure that system rollout is smooth and issues are rectified on a smaller level before a full blown rollout occurs, therefore, I will propose the following three strategies to minimize the risk of the failure of Epic system implementation in Stanford Hospital and Clinics.

A hybrid rollout

We will roll out the system in phases starting with the clinical application side first where most of the products used are already dated. The way clinics operate this change would be moderately disruptive for them and will help the staff to get them acquainted with the new system as well as making it possible to resolve any issue that might come up during the system implementation. With hospital, we need to perform a "big bang" implementation because it won't be clinically safe to implement the system in phases due to the high interaction of different units in the hospital.

High involvement of the users of the system in Configuring and customizing the system

Hospitals and clinics are very highly collaborative environments, therefore, high involvement of the system users especially doctors would be an integral part of the success of the system. If the users will resent the system it will directly contribute into the failure of system implementation efforts. It's hard for any organization to accept the change; people don't want to get out of their comfort zone until they really see a big benefit for themselves or feel that they had a say in the new proposed change. We will form a committee of physicians (from the hospital and clinics) to spend at least half of their time dedicated to system implementation effort where they will make decisions related to system configuration and customization.

Staffing

Getting the users support is important to implement the system, however, a capable and dedicated IT staff is also a big part of the success of system implementation, therefore, we will pick and dedicate some bright IT professional from within the organization who can learn the system faster along with hiring contractors (preferably contract to hire so that we will have an option to hire some of those contractors if warranted) who already have the knowledge of the Epic system, this will not only help in expediting the process but it will also make sure that we are not disrupting any existing IT support provided by the current IT staff of SCH.