Guest Blogger: Chris – Clinical Analyst Consultant
Part 2 of our series on what it’s really like to be a nurse informaticist. If you’ve ever wondered what they actually do, this is our opportunity to get an example of just that!Monday
08:00
-Arrive at the office, open up emails and get caught up with emails from last week.
-I see two emails marked as urgent. Hospital A is requesting an emergency fix/change to one of their post-op forms. It appears the form is not working properly and their analyst needs help troubleshooting problem.
-The other email marked urgent is hospital B wanting to make some design changes to their forms and they want to see if there will be any downstream impact by their request.
-I quickly type the troubleshooting steps to the analyst at Hospital A and inform him that, if the steps don’t work, to email me back and let me know so that we can setup a time to review issue
-I let Hospital B know that I’ll take a look on their design changes later on during the day.
09:00
-We have a meeting scheduled with the intra-op, pre-op and post-op nurses to review current paper workflow they use to document cases. There doesn’t seem to be a consensus as to what the proper workflow should be and it seems that the representative sent by the intra-op department that is not well versed in the intra-op workflow. There is a request to meet again with the proper people to make the right decisions. Not a good start for the week nor this project.
-Will discuss incident with project manager.
10:00
-Meeting with the scheduling department to give 2nd demo on how the scheduling application works and to answer issues they could raise. The scheduling group believes that the application is too slow and that it doesn’t allow them to track the techs who run equipment. We addressed the slow issue by actually scheduling patients using shortcuts that were not detailed in the previous demo and staff was pleased. Yet, we have to come up with a solution to the tech scheduling tracking issue.
11:00
-Back to my desk and check/reply to emails.
-Analyst from hospital A has replied. My steps didn’t fix the issue. He wants to know if there is any chance I can log on to their system today. They have opened a ticket with the vendor already, but most likely the vendor will only get back to them within a couple of days. As I have time later in the afternoon, we set up a meeting for 4pm.
12:00
-Lunch time
13:00
-Back from lunch. There are strings of emails from the OR group. They seem to be having conflicts scheduling the meeting. The only available date is at the end of the week, which will put the project timeline in jeopardy. Meeting needs to take place asap.
-I write emails to the project manager and site manager to let them know of the situation. In the meantime, my other analyst colleague is trying to get a hold of the OR director to address the scheduling conflict directly with her.
14:00
-Head out to meet with the OR manager, but she has an impromptu meeting with a couple of surgeons.
-We decide to hit the cafeteria, get a frapuccino and come back to meet the OR manager.
14:30
-We meet with the OR manager. We discuss the timeline and talk about the OR meeting. As the right pre-op personnel didn’t attend, we found ourselves in the impossibility to map the current workflow. OR manager emphasizes that staff is short, whereas we emphasize the project timeline. After going back and forth, we decide that if pre-op doesn’t show up, then intra-op will make decisions for them, and they will fix any issues later. There is a real risk though that they won’t be happy with the documentation, hence the importance to send the right pre-op staff to the meeting. OR manager understands the situation and agrees to schedule a meeting for Wednesday morning with the proper staff.
15:30
-Back to my desk, inform hospital B that I won’t be able to look on their design until next day.
-Make sure the presentation is ready for the supply chain meeting next day.
16:00
-Call analyst from Hospital A to assist troubleshooting the problem. I log on remotely to the system and we go through the basic setup of the form, which looks fine. Then I notice that one of the rules appears to have the wrong logic. I ask to have the rules emailed to me for more analysis.
-Once I get the email with the rules I start analyzing. I reconfigure the rule in the test domain, but after about 30 min of troubleshooting, I’m still getting the error. I decide to go home and give it a try the next day.
Stay Tuned for more from this 4 part Series of a real world day-to-day example of the work a nurse informaticist does. Part 1 (Introduction) , Part 2 (Day 1)[author-box-2]
About chrisnihq
[...] Life of a Consultant Clinical Analyst… [...]