Come see me at a speaking tour on EHR implementation and other health system IT priorities in Chicago, Newark, and Santa Ana

One of the most frequent questions I receive is how fellow CIOs, architects, technology directors, and other IT staff help ensure successful EHR implementations. EHR deployments are some of the most complicated efforts that any IT group can undertake but the successful ones all have some commonalities that go well beyond “be sure to get your requirements right” and other high-level platitudes. Nothing can guarantee success, but there are very specific things you can do to help make sure your team has a fighting chance.

Another type of question I get regularly is “do you know how other health systems and hospitals are implementing technology X?” You can replace “X” with almost any high-priority hospital or health system topic like virtualization, storage, information exchange, etc. There are no silver bullets because each health system is different, but there are enough similarities that we can discuss them and provide resources that will save each other time.

In early December I will be leading a speaking tour where the main topic will be how to ensure successful EHR implementations but we’ll cover many other high-priority IT topics that are top of mind within hospital and health system IT leadership and technical circles. To mix it up a bit, these will be live in-person events as opposed to the normal webinars that I lead because we’d like to get an interactive discussion started as well. I feel that there’s to much “talking to” IT teams instead of learning from each so we’ll try a model where we can do some facilitation between participants and maybe help people create communities of practice (CoP) where members can help each other long after the events are over.

Here are the dates and times for the three city tour — each event starts at 6p, includes a meal, and finishes up by 8p.

• Chicago, IL – Tuesday, December 7, Wildfire Chicago
• West Orange, NJ – Thursday, December 9, The Wilshire Grand Hotel, Primavera Restaurant
• Santa Ana, CA – Tuesday, December 14, Morton’s Santa Ana

Please drop by to learn or interact with your peers and teach them what you’ve learned.

Don’t forget, if you’re looking for EHR selection and Meaningful Use advise, get my free unbiased resources over at HITSphere.