Implementing MaaS will provide tangible benefits to your organization.  Preplanning is a valuable step in meeting your organization’s goals and establishing the foundation for a smooth, effective implementation and go-live.  Benefits of preplanning include ensuring project clarity, efficient project management and decision making, and effective resource allocation. 

What is preplanning?

Utilizing the months leading up to your implementation kick off to define the project parameters and scope, identify and manage required resources, and outline and gain consensus on how the project will be run.

This process typically includes completing and documenting the following:

• Define and engage your stakeholders, i.e., providers, administrators, IT staff, and patients.  Use this time to identify and collaborate with stakeholders to gather input, address concerns, and ensure the system aligns with their needs. 

• Complete a needs assessment identifying key requirements, challenges, and desired outcomes of the project in front of you.  Interviewing stakeholders and department heads is a great place to start.  Ask stakeholders how they will measure success, so you can include this feedback in your development of key performance indicators. 

• Consider the needs assessment when defining project scope.  Implementing the MaaS solution will involve multiple layers of technology, integration, data migration, configuration, and process alignment.  Clearly outline what will be in vs. out of scope, breaking work out by phase (Preplanning, Configuration/Build, Test/Train, Go-live, Optimization) and by team. 

• Define governance, communication, and change management strategies.  The implementation will bring significant change to the organization.  Identifying in advance how decisions will be made, communicated and managed will prevent future delays, and improve user acceptance. 

• Build out the project plan.  You will receive a plan from MEDITECH.  Take the time to add details and requirements of meeting each milestone, which are specific to your organization.  This process will also facilitate risk identification and mitigation. 

• Resource planning – MEDITECH will provide a minimum staffing guide.  How does this align with your desired outcomes? Most organizations operate in a lean staffing model. Take this into consideration when identifying risks.  Ensure resources are not over allocated in your staffing plan, and that their departmental duties are adequately covered.  Gain leadership consensus and ensure this coverage is built into the budget.  Testing, training and reporting are areas that are often under allocated and should be considered as part of your planning. 

• Identify all third-party tools, software, interfaces, which will be impacted by this move.  Will they all be necessary in future state?  Are there opportunities for consolidation? What is the impact on the resource plan?

• Data Migration strategy – If data is converted from an other vendor system to MEDITECH, do you have the resources internally, with necessary bandwidth, to create extracts, map the fields and validate the data?  Begin to gather specifications and line up vendors, if needed.  

• Workflow Analysis – Are there opportunities for workflow optimization and improvement before you begin configuring the EHR?  This analysis informs decisions around how MEDITECH can be tailored to fit the organizations processes and minimize disruption.

• Legacy system Clean up - identify efforts that will streamline the build and can be started in advance of receiving access, such as review and consolidation of the item master, preference cards, charge master and test/procedure order clean up. Also, consider data clean up, including MPI and outstanding balances. 

These decisions and tools need to be in place before the team begins the implementation, to ensure a smooth, consistent implementation that will successfully meet expected outcomes.

Where to start?

First, evaluate your organization’s ability to complete the preplanning internally.  Consider the following:

• Does your team have experience running large implementation projects?

• Do they have the bandwidth?

• Be sure to Identify and prioritize competing initiatives in your evaluation.

Support resources come in many forms:

• MEDITECH is an excellent source of information. 

• The MUSE community includes forums and similar organizations, who have been through this process.  You’ll find many to be generous with their time and willingness to share lessons learned. 

• In addition to MUSE, networking with peers can be valuable. 

• A project management professional, with experience implementing Expanse, can also help in performing some or all the activities.