We Standardize and Repeat

The first time HCI does anything hard, it hurts.

I want to tell you why that is a feature.

Two weeks ago we launched HCI ONE Rounding, and I admitted in the launch post that our one-day Epic writeback install took four days. Epic is very specific about what gets written into a patient’s chart, and it should be.

Here is what I did not fully explain: what happened during those four days is the entire business model.

Pain, once

Day one, we were confident. Day two, we were humble. Day three, we were educated. Day four, it worked.

And on day five, we wrote it all down.

Every field mapping. Every validation rule. Every permission requirement. Every thing Epic rejected and why. The whole learning curve, converted into a checklist.

That checklist is now the product.

The next hospital does not get our four days. It gets day four.

We have been doing this since 2008

Our first Cerner integration was around 2008. It took months, and we learned things about clinical integrations that you can only learn the hard way.

Today, connecting HCI ONE to a hospital’s clinical systems is a defined process, because seventeen years of hard-way lessons became procedure.

The first whiteboard deployments taught us about mounting, networks, and what happens to hardware in a real patient room. Now whiteboard installs are routine.

The first eSitting deployment is teaching us right now. It will hurt exactly once.

Why this matters if you are buying

Every vendor demos well. The demo is the easy part.

The question worth asking any vendor — including us — is: “How many times have you done this exact thing, and what did the first one teach you?”

If the answer is a story with real scar tissue and a checklist at the end of it, you are talking to someone who will not practice on your hospital.

If the answer is a slide, you are the checklist.

We standardize and repeat. The scars are documented. The guinea pig era is over.

You are welcome to the results.

See the Deployment Process