First, I want to thank everyone I have met during my first few weeks here at CHOC for all of their help getting me “up to speed” on everything going on in this wonderful institution. I meet new physician colleagues every day and hope to meet as many of you as possible in the coming months. I won’t be working clinically yet at CHOC until our new ORs open, but will be back at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital (LPCH), working a couple days a month. Prior to becoming the CMIO here at CHOC, I was actively practicing pediatric anesthesia at LPCH, and responsible for their perioperative information systems (Surginet). As additional background, I am boarded in Pediatrics and Pediatric Critical Care (now expired) and spent the first half of my career as an intensivist, so I’m pretty familiar with the clinical activity in a children’s hospital. I’ve met several of you in my prior roles, and even started my critical care practice in the pulmonary group at Children’s Hospital Oakland with Dr. Nickerson. (Way too many years ago to state!) In addition, much of my career has be focused on IT, helping implement clinical and administrative systems at several institutions. I have a great deal of experience with Cerner, and have served as a consultant for them in their perioperative business unit. Enough about me…now for a brief update…
Next week, we will present you with yet another upgrade of our Cerner EHR (CUBS). Recently, the look and navigation changed somewhat with the implementation of “Enhanced View” within Powerchart. That was the prerequisite for moving to the latest code level (2012). Jumping to this new code was necessary to enable a move to ICD-10 in the near future. It has some potential new functionality we haven’t yet implemented, so about all you will notice now is a change in color scheme. If you’re not partial to blue, you may not be thrilled with the change! Please let me or the CI docs (Drs. Andreef, Chang, Grant and Taraman) know if you have any issues with the new code. For any significant problems you find, please fill out a help desk ticket.
As we move forward the next few months, 4 new “Nets” will go live to support operations in the new tower. Stabilizing the existing system before copying in all of the new Nets will require that we severely limit changes to the system. If you have been eagerly awaiting that specific enhancement you’ve requested, you’ll have to be patient. We can’t do the testing we need to do and assure that everything is working properly if we keep changing things in our current system.
I hope that I can soon move my focus from operations and opening the tower to future IT development initiatives at CHOC. The technology world around us is moving to mobile devices, social networking, cloud based computing and the like faster than the medical field and we need to keep pace. Our patients are getting more web-savvy and are looking for more direct access, we have needs to share information across institutions, we have to continue to improve the care we provide to stay competitive, we need to support research and advance the knowledge in our specialties, etc. We also need to improve the usability of all the systems we have put into place so that they just facilitate care, not make care more difficult. The plate will continue to be full as we continue our development in IT, but it will be truely exciting times! I hope you can enjoy them with me.
My current location is the 8th floor of Centrum in Suite 88O (ISD). My email is wfeaster@choc.org. My cell is 714-403-1692. Feel free to contact me. Bill Feaster
