Implementing a New EHR to Manage Complex Care Needs

Behavioral health providers are under growing pressure to meet rising demand while managing increasingly complex care needs. To improve workflows, KVC Health Systems, an organization focused on behavioral health and child welfare, partnered with WellSky to implement WellSky Specialty Care for Behavioral Health – an EHR (Electronic Health Record) designed specifically for behavioral health providers. KVC is now fully operational with the platform across its network.

Healthcare Innovation recently spoke with KVC CIO Lonnie Johnson about the implementation of the new EHR.

Could you tell us why your organization adopted a new EHR?

We've been in the EHR business for about 18 years now. We've been using what we call a third-party EHR, and originally we were with one organization, and as we started to grow as an organization over the last five to seven years, we've seen some exponential growth within the organization through mergers and acquisitions. We needed something that was more extensible, something more flexible. We needed something that could change with our change.

What were some of the parameters that you had when looking for a new EHR?

One was advanced analytics, and the other was artificial intelligence. We're about to pilot one of their new AI features here in a couple of weeks.

How did you find the process from finding the new EHR system to implementation?

We're very methodical about acquiring new technology. We do some imperative analysis. We do some demos. We bring people in. We ask: can we test drive it? When we say we bring people in, we actually have them on site and talk with their representatives. We look at some of their existing customers to see how they like it. We start paring it down as a leadership team; we all get together and start looking at the different options and the different reasons why or why not we should go with a particular one. And then once we make our decision.

It's a matter of becoming a partner with the EHR provider. We have a good project management team at our company, and so our project management team blends with their project management team for the implementation phase. In this particular case, we had to do an expedited implementation because we needed to have this EHR ready for a new hospital that we were building. We were able to implement this in almost half the time that you would do a normal EHR implementation.
This took a lot of teamwork and coordination, a lot of project management skills to be able to pull some things out and put some things aside. It was a huge undertaking, but we were able to pull it off, and it went pretty smoothly.

What kind of issues did you experience, and how did you solve them?

There’s always the unknown. So those things, you have to deal with after the fact. We were expecting it to work, and it didn't. These were a couple of minor things. We were able to get with the EHR provider quickly. They were very responsive to our needs, gave us dedicated support at no extra cost, and quickly repaired and got those things working in the right order.

When did you go live with the new system?

We went live in January of this year. We did it in phases. We had five locations, and we completed three of them in January, and then we completed the remaining two over the next six months.

What have you seen so far?

It's been smooth. I've been doing system implementation probably for about 35 years. And this is one of the smoother ones. When you have those big ones, there's always going to be something that goes wrong. Despite the fact that we had to do it faster than normal, I would say we experienced about the same amount of fallout that we would have if we would have done it at the regular time.

Do you have any connectivity with physical-health EHRs or data?

We work closely. We are doing what we call joint ventures now. That means that we are working with other larger hospital systems. There's one in Kansas City called Children's Mercy Hospital. What we're doing is doing a joint venture with them. When children come to their emergency department (ED) for physical things, and if they have behavioral or emotional issues as well, they send them to us. There is some interoperability.

Could you speak to some ongoing improvements to the system?

I have an AI road map that's going to encompass pretty much all of our functionality across the agency, whether it's foster care, inpatient care, financial services, HR, anything that we do. AI is a huge undertaking that we're doing, and that functionality in the Wellsky EHR that I was telling you about, which we're testing now, falls right in line with our AI road map that we're rolling out right now across the agency. AI is an ongoing, new way of life for us. We're using it to pretty much transform our business model.

What are some of the advantages that you foresee?

With AI, the most common thing that people talk about is creating efficiencies, which saves time. We're seeing that, but it also enhances the user experience. People are more engaged. Now they don't have that more burdensome work where they have to do a lot of documentation. Like case managers, they go out and see children all day for behavioral health, and then they come home and do documentation over dinner for a couple of hours while they're trying to get their kids tucked in. Well, if we can use AI to reduce that paperwork by 60-70 percent, then we give them back a big chunk of their life. We're improving the quality of care because the information now has a higher quality. There are less human errors. The data has higher quality, therefore the quality of care is higher.

What has been the feedback from employees using the new EHR?

A lot of them are very happy. It coincides with a lot of the workflows that we have. It coincides with a lot of the workflows we have wanted to do. Now there are some people who are getting adjusted to it because there will always be people who don't adjust to change very well. That's just human nature. Overall, the results are very positive. No one wants to go back to the old way of doing things, that's for sure.

Do you have any advice for other healthcare leaders who are looking at different EHR systems?

I would say do your homework. Don't take this decision lightly. Once you make that decision, you're stuck with it for two to three years. You want to make sure that you're making the right decision. Get to know that technology provider, visit their office, meet the CEO, ask them what their plans are for technology. What does their future road map look like? And again, meet with some of their current customers. Ask them how they're doing and what the transition was like for them. That will be helpful in getting you settled on whether to make that transition with that particular provider or not.