Sagacious Consultants Blog Can Your Change Control Processes Support Affiliates?

by: Danika Killian, Gordon Lashmett, and James Pike Today's quickly-evolving healthcare market incentivizes EHR integration and data sharing. These changes and more demand mature, well-documented governance structures and change control processes, but not all modern healthcare organizations have these in place. Clear expectations promote communication and satisfaction. Establish clear governance and change control expectations as part of affiliate engagement in EHR solutions. These should include processes, roles, responsibilities, and boundaries for what is and is not negotiable. This helps with maintenance not only of software, but also of key business relationships. If you are extending your EHR, it's important to consider a few important questions, as their answers will shape the process: 1. Governance: Does your organization understand and follow internal governance structures, decision making bodies, roles and responsibilities? Before additional parties can be included in your structure and processes, it is critical that they are understood and following internally. 2. Changes: Are your decision-making and change control processes efficient and effective? Does your current model support affiliate engagement? Affiliate partners who pay for your solution will expect some involvement in future system changes. 3. Continuity: What will it take to avoid negatively affecting current operations as you process affiliate feedback and requests? Avoiding disruption to your internal end users and already-live affiliates is an important aspect that should be considered throughout your change control processes. 4. Improvements: Who drives system enhancement and optimization efforts? Is your current model reactive to operational requests, or proactive in anticipating the needs of your users? If your operations team is able to set and drive priorities, looping affiliates into the fold can be smoother and easier to support. 5. Effectiveness: How does the maturity of your own processes compare with those of similar organizations? If an affiliate has multiple options for their EHR extension within your market, effective governance can be a selling point. 6. Responsiveness: Can you maintain and improve your software and IT solutions in a way that meets expectations for efficiency and quality? Your ability to meet changing regulatory and quality requirements with your EHR solution is important to paying affiliates. After answering these questions, consider the challenges of adding an additional layer of affiliate support to your current model. Once your internal governance structures and change control processes have matured, you will be able to clearly assess and determine how your affiliates should be incorporated. To truly get affiliates on board, the hub organization must have mature change control processes that are clearly and consistently driven by clinical and business direction. This is much easier for affiliates to adapt to than seemingly impromptu changes based on isolated needs and wants. Often, because there are fewer stakeholders, smaller independent organizations are not accustomed to robust governance or change control processes. For them, this will be an additional bureaucratic challenge on top of learning and adopting a new and integrated system. Sagacious Consultants has a strong history of understanding the practical and political realities of navigating affiliate extensions, and can not only help you assess the questions above, but also provide recommendations on how to incorporate affiliate partners into governance and change control structures already in place at your organization. Your affiliates will expect to have input - after all, they are paying customers - so clearly outlining their pathway to providing input will help avoid potential political pitfalls, provide a level playing field across affiliates, and increase the value proposition for other possible affiliate candidates.