This week marks the half-way point in my project to fully implement the outpatient clinics on the new electronic surgery scheduling form. It has been a long road to get to here, over 3 years of investigation, development, and trial and error. To sum it up, this process allows clinic schedulers to use one form to request OR time, get their patient’s pre-certed for surgery, and schedule a pre-op evaluation appointment. Previously, it could take up to three forms to complete that process.

Additionally, this means that the OR schedulers, pre-cert staff, and pre-op eval staff now all receive the same form from these clinics, instead of every clinic sending their version of the form in a million different ways. The electronic form has been in development and testing for as long as I can remember, but our EMR is finally able to keep up with the advanced tasks we are asking it to perform.

Anyway, the actual implementation has been a huge accomplishment of mine over the past 4 months, and I hope to be completely finished by the end of summer!