At GE Healthcare, we’ve talked about the importance of engaging Physician Champions in the assessment of cardiovascular information systems that deliver structured reporting capabilities. These same principles apply to implementing structured reporting. In this post, we’ll explore who Physician Champions are, why they are critical to driving adoption of structured reporting, and what a successful structured reporting rollout looks like. We’ll use a real case study as an example and incorporate best practices that the GE Healthcare team has learned from years of physician reporting implementations in the field.

In case you missed it, learn more about the benefits of structured reporting and where dictation and transcription fall short.

First: What is a Physician Champion?

A physician champion is a physician who takes on a leadership role in a technology implementation to partner with IT and administration to represent clinical workflow needs and drive change among their peers. An ideal candidate is respected by their peers, embraces change and enjoys working with technology. This person does not need to be in a formal leadership role (such as a department chair) but should have the aptitude to motivate others, problem solve, and have a reputation of clinical leadership. The physician champion will be a key stakeholder in all aspects of the project including planning, go live, training and ongoing enhancements.

Beginning a Roll-out with a Physician Champion

The first consideration when thinking about organizational change is how it will affect clinical and administrative staff as well as the impact to patient care. Physician approval of new systems isn’t easy to obtain. When moving an entire group of physicians into a structured reporting environment, communication, collaboration and training are key.

Some health systems prefer to start with a phased approach, starting with Echo or other non-invasive service lines to implement structured reporting and then adding additional modules on a rolling schedule. Others will go live with non-invasive and invasive structured reporting at the same time and even across multiple hospitals all at once. Consider how equipped your organization’s training, IT and clinical staff are to support the rollout to determine the right path for your health system.

Where do Physician Champions come in? Given their first-hand experience in navigating the organization’s unique workflows, they are valuable liaisons between a hospital’s IT department, structured reporting solution vendors and ultimately the clinical end-users. The first step is to appoint at least one Physician Champion per facility, ideally per service line who can take the lead for their peers.

When it comes to:

Physician training: While GE Healthcare provides staff support and superuser training, Physician Champions can be utilized to provide a layer of confidence for their peers that increases physician engagement.
Go-live: Physician Champions are invaluable points of contact for communicating physician feedback to the vendor and hospital IT project teams.
Post-go-live: Physician Champions should be involved in regular steering committee meetings to present consolidated clinically necessary enhancement requests on behalf of physician users.

While much work and planning is done well in advance, let’s review an example timeline starting 3 months prior to go live to give you an idea of how it might look at your organization.

Example Structured Reporting Roll-out Plan Timeline

Roll-Out Plan Chart.JPG

3 months prior
Start the clinical review process for each module in scope with physician champions. Take advantage of clinical content that comes out of the box and leverage the workflow expertise of your structured reporting vendor to learn what’s worked at other hospitals and what pitfalls to avoid. It’s important that the physicians are empowered to provide feedback so the solution will meet their needs.

1 month prior
A few weeks before go-live, we recommend freezing any further changes to the solution. It’s time to finalize staff training, end-to-end user testing and physician training for reporting. Physician Champions’ can make sure physicians are attending trainings or conduct individualized sessions for those unable to attend.

Go live
Moving into production all teams should be poised to support users where needed.
Through the first month or two, have a process to collect feedback / change requests but keep changes to a minimum while users adjust to the new workflow. Change management can be challenging. Requests can be reviewed and prioritized on a regular basis by a steering committee including designated physician champions.

Further best practices for rolling out structured reporting

A few tips to keep in mind when it comes time to begin your roll-out:

We can’t stress enough: Physician Champions are key. What’s more, the right Physician Champion. Rather than simply C-level figureheads, they should be project-level team members with responsibilities, homework assignments and deadlines. Of course, they should also enjoy working with technology and embracing change.
Prep to engage with physicians in advance. Physician Champions are still practicing physicians and do not have a ton of time. Lean on your solution provider to help prepare studies and workflows in advance for training events and set expectations with all physicians to participate.
Big bang or phased roll-out? What will work best for your team in terms of staffing and support? Going live on the same day across multiple facilities or multiple modes means you can drive cultural change across the organization and more quickly adjust full end-to-end workflow to help enhance productivity. On the other hand, a phased implementation that deploys one part of the system at a time can foster peer-to-peer discussion on how to improve processes as you go.
Superusers are critical to post go-live. Make sure that when your solution provider walks away, there are still people onsite to support users, to maximize utilization of cardiovascular information systems, and to share their knowledge base. The ideal candidate is a team member with great communication skills—someone who gives you confidence in the system and its use.

Learn more from a successful case study

Methodist San Antonio went live with structured reporting across multiple locations for adult & pediatric echo, stress echo, NIPV, nuclear and stress nuclear reporting.

You can learn how we applied the above best practices to a real-world use case, and its results, in a recent webinar we hosted along with a practicing cardiologist at Methodist Healthcare. It’s available to view on-demand.

To learn about GE Healthcare’s Cardiovascular IT solution, visit our website.

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Leveraging Physician Champions to Roll-out Structured Reporting

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