House-wide transcription phase underway; new tutorials posted

CPOE Status Update

As of today, the house-wide transcription phase (nurses transcribing all paper orders into electronic ones) is underway. We're in the home stretch and the countdown timer is inside of seven days.

We all need to remain vigilant for new issues or speedbumps and always remember to take care of the patient first in urgent situations.

New Tutorials

Also, a couple of new tutorials are up over on the tutorials page.

Filtering & Customizing the view on the Orders page

Copying a PowerNote forward to a new note

Sandy is a %!+@#

 Finally, this website is hosted by some folks out of NYC at an outfit called Squarespace. It's been a very high quality service and a pleasure to work with their product. Earlier this week, Sandy dumped a pile of water on top of them and they have literally been carrying fuel up 17 flights of stairs to a generator to keep sites like our litte users group up and running. Their story is updated here on this Squarespace Sandy Status page and it's kind of a compelling read if you're bored. Alas, despite their herculean efforts, this and other Squarespace sites are at risk of going down over the next few days. If that happens, CPOE will be postponed. Okay, just kidding, CPOE will not be postponed. But this site might go away. Apologies in advance if that happens.

CPOE is live on the Pedi floor and in the PICU

My understanding from this afternoon is that physician documentation in the PICU was done fully electronically this morning and that the paper charts on both the Pedi floor and in the PICU are gone, replaced by a fully electronic chart. And, I believe that as of this afternoon, physicians and providers are entering most orders electronically.

Image Credit: CrazyMomLife (via flickr)

Make no mistake, this transition is not going to be painless. We should remain vigilant to potential new issues CPOE may be introducing, but also must remain open to the promise which it can deliver. The key, in my opinion, will be in simply making the effort to make it work. Thanks in advance to everyone who's going to be doing that, and special thanks to everyone from nurses to RT to PT to HUCs to physicians and other providers on the second floor who have lived through the first week of pilot and are doing the hard work of the guinea pig.

A resident today told me, "I know you don't want to hear it, but this isn't very intuitive." Believe me, I don't mind hearing that. In fact, I communicate that message to the folks at Cerner all the time. But improvements are made daily and I really believe that there are trade offs with every EHR. We need to make this work.

End of rant.

Congrats pedi folks and good luck over the next week.

Congrats Clinical IT folks and good luck over the next weeks.

uCern: Facebook for Cerner users

The uCern site that Cerner hosts is chock full of great discussions and helpful information about anything and everything to do with PowerChart. It is well worth your time to join up and participate if you want to:

1. learn more about using PowerChart successfully
2. find like-minded users who may be struggling with the same things you are
3. ask questions of both Cerner folks and other users like us
4. explore some of what Cerner is doing to improve the product in the future

Here's a link to the Cerner Physician Community, which is as good a place as any to get started.

The main uCern page is here.

There is a brief sign up process, but the more we participate, the more our voice is heard.

We weigh a lot.

Seventeen million tons. That's how overweight we are. Where, by we, I mean the whole planet, not just me and you. But still. 

One especially embarassing point:

Despite only making up five per cent of the world's population, the United States accounts for almost a third of the world's weight due to obesity, the researchers found.

On a barely related note, the brand new ambulatory summary where you can order things and renew meds and modify the problem list and do all kinds of other stuff debuts Wednesday, June 20. How is that related, you probably aren't asking. Well, I'll tell you anyway. It's related because quite promninently in the Vital Signs section of that page, your patient's BMI is posted for you. Just one more service we offer here.

Welcome to the PUTTER Users Group

It is our hope this site will grow into a resource for users of the combined UMC, UMCP, Texas Tech Electronic Health Record System.

In addition to this site, we anticipate having regular users group meetings either at lunch or in the evenings, during which there may be a short presentation on tips or tricks or new features, followed by Q&A, and hopefully complimented by the simple of interaction of users, sharing frustrations and ideas and workarounds and knowledge about the system.

The implementation of an electronic medical record is almost always a somewhat difficult process.

Parts of this site may not work well in Internet Explorer 6, which is a crappy browser anyway and not one which you should be using to browse the Internet. We recommend using one of the following browsers for a better PUTTER experience:

Firefox

Chrome

Safari