How Permanent Resource Placements Yield Greater Budget Savings and Ongoing Support in The Epic Life Cycle
For health systems, hospitals, and physician groups, the life cycle of an Epic system can be broken down into two phases: Plan, build and implement in Phase 1, followed by Phase 2 – internal support and optimization. Unfortunately, as many of our clients have found, once the implementation go-live phase is complete, cost and knowledge retention drastically change due to underestimating the expenses and efforts required when consultants leave.
Has your organization experienced budget, staffing, transitioning and maintenance challenges after go-live? Have you lost the best talent on your application teams because they were a contracted consultant? Have you realized that projected post-live support and optimization budgets were significantly under-calculated? Are you recovering from a sub-optimal transition to post-live long-term support?
If you answered ‘yes’ to any of these questions, then you understand that resource transitions can get tricky. They are typically under budgeted and lack optimal execution. Many of our clients have experienced significant training, hand-off, and overall expertise gaps as primary application ownership shifts quickly from Epic Consultants to internal FTE Analysts.
What if there was a better way to solve for this with proper planning at the outset of the project?
Recently, we developed and executed a unique implementation hiring plan in partnership with an east coast Integrated Delivery Network in which we facilitated the placement of both full-time, permanent Epic Analysts and ID’s and supplemental Epic Consultants for 18-month contracts. As the project concludes, consultants complete their contracts and leave the organization, but 15 permanent Certified Epic employees remain, retaining and deploying the implementation knowledge critical to optimally support and later refine and expand functionality of the system.
The solution:
- Develop a resource-need plan factoring in both internal FTEs and consultants.
- Be mindful of multiple broad skillsets across different modules that can be utilized for long-term support and optimization.
- Think of the next 5 years and work backwards. What will you need now and in the foreseeable future to support your system?
- Hire both top-notch Epic Certified Permanent FTEs and consultants to work side by side. Let them create, design, learn and succeed together.
- Plan for knowledge transfer upfront, secure in the knowledge that a high percentage of the employees will stay at the health system as permanent employees.
The results speak for themselves:
- By bringing in both consultants and permanent employees, the healthcare organization can reduce consulting fees and increase knowledge retention at project conclusion.
- Savings are monumental. Owning the resources and their information will save millions of dollars in consultant fees for implementation.
- Click here for our case study outlining $3M in cost savings for identifying and hiring both permanent and consulting resource needs during an Epic implementation and legacy application wind-down.
- Millions more can be saved long term throughout the optimization and support phase
- Learn how health systems can experience millions in implementation cost savings by maintaining the permanent resources after the go-live.
- No surprise support and optimization costs after go-live. The team of FTE employees oversee maintenance internally, requiring no need to bring in third party system-specific firms to fix any broken links.
- The FTEs can support and optimize your system for the future.
The end goals: Have a plan to identify and hire both top Epic certified permanent and consultant resources. Eliminate the hidden support fees. Reduce costs. Maintain the most flawless optimization of your Epic system after go-live.
To learn more about solving for your Resource Management needs, contact us today about our strategy and results by emailing our team at oursolutions@roundtablehit.com.
