Homecare Homebase Goes Live in Manhattan!
Monday, July 16, was the Manhattan “go live” date for VNSNY Home Care’s new electronic medical records (EMR) system, Homecare Homebase. After two months piloting the new system as well as weeks of staff training, Homecare Homebase was now being rolled out across the entire Manhattan region. To learn how things went during the first week with the new EMR, Frontline VNSNY spoke with three Manhattan Home Care staff members—Clinical Field Manager Shannon Whittington, Branch Director Patricia Johnson, and field nurse Seana Mohammed. Here are their reports:
Shannon Whittington, Manhattan Home Care Clinical Field Manager
“I think the hardest part of the launch was fear of the unknown,” says Shannon Whittington, Clinical Field Manager for Manhattan Home Care Branch 3. “I’d spent hours poring over the Homecare Homebase training modules, but I wondered if I’d really absorbed what I needed to know to support my branch staff and work the system effectively.” To give herself extra time, she arrived at 1250 Broadway at 6:30 that Monday morning—two hours early. “To my surprise, many of my colleagues were showing up then, too!” she says.
The launch called for all new patients to be seen in the Homecare Homebase system. Meanwhile, existing Home Care patients will continue in the old system until their episodes of care are completed. As the workday officially began, Shannon concentrated on supporting her clinicians in the field and triaging their new patients, giving first priority to the most acute cases. As she did, she noticed that everyone—including herself—was ignoring their desk chairs and instead was on their feet. “It was like the trading floor on Wall Street,” she notes, “but instead of shouting, everyone was exchanging information. When one of us discovered an easy way to navigate to an essential page or find a key report, we shared our tips with each other: Hey, this works!”
The Branch 3 Team, left to right: Terrence Richardson, Odell Miller, Constance Evans, Evelyn Velez, Shannon Whittington, Michelle Gomes and Homecare Homebase consultant Trent Hunter.
At the center of the activity were the representatives from the Homecare Homebase company, on hand to offer guidance to the VNSNY staff and answer any questions they had. “The Homecare Homebase reps gave us invaluable advice on navigating the system and finding what we were looking for—and their sense of calm was contagious,” says Shannon. “After a while, you start to think, ‘I can do this! And I’m going to continue doing it!’ The support we got, both from those reps and from our own leadership, is the reason our clinicians and managerial staff were able to launch this EMR so successfully.” On hand providing critical oversight, she notes, were Ginny Field, Vice President of the Manhattan Home Care region, Susan Northover, Senior Vice President for Patient Care Services and Clinical Operations Support, and Marsha Serrano-Ramos, Vice President of the Bronx/Westchester Home Care region.
As the week progressed, adds Shannon, everyone became increasingly confident in their ability to utilize the new EMR. “The week just flew by. We built on our knowledge a little more each day, and by the end of the week everyone was feeling fairly comfortable, she says. “We still have a lot to learn, but we survived, and we did it together. It was a great team effort. Manhattan is a very strong region and we’ve always worked well together, but it really showed during this time.”
Shannon predicts that the EMR implementation will go even more smoothly as staff become more familiar with the system’s several hundred different report options. “We had good training for this launch, but you really learn by doing,” she says. “With Homecare Homebase, everything is in in one place. You have tremendous access to real-time data at the snap of your fingers. It’s one-stop shopping, like a super Walmart super store. Now we are learning what’s in the aisles and on the shelves.”
Patricia Johnson, Manhattan Home Care Branch Director
As she prepared for Manhattan Home Care’s July 16 launch of Homecare Homebase, Patricia “Pat” Johnson was also aware of the fact that she was onboarding new staff members. Simultaneous with the launch of the new EMR system, the Manhattan region switched to a new organizational structure. Moving forward, the region will now operate as seven geographically distinct branches. Each branch contains two interdisciplinary care teams, jointly overseen by a clinical field manager and a clinical review manager, plus dedicated representatives from Intake, Customer Service and Scheduling.
As the head of newly formed Manhattan Home Care Branch 6, Pat wanted to be sure not only that her branch’s EMR rollout went well, but that she made her new reports from Intake, Customer Service and Scheduling feel welcome. “They used to work in their own departments, and I knew they were feeling a certain degree of separation anxiety on this first day with a new supervisor,” she says. “So I went over to them, introduced myself and just made them feel comfortable and part of their new home and new family in Branch 6.”
The Branch 6 Team, left to right: Aida Pagan, Mikelange Herve, Niani Pebbles, Lisa Hopkins, Lisa Garcia and Homecare Homebase consultant Sydney Chilcoat.
Pat was equally supportive of her team managers—one of who had just been named to her positon after years in the field—and her clinical staff out on the frontlines. “It was an intense week, in a good way,” she says. “We were all sort of living on the edge, because while we’d heard wonderful things about the system, we still didn’t know what it would be like actually using it. From my perspective, when I came to work that Monday morning my whole focus was on empowering my staff so that they were able to embrace this new initiative. I let everyone know that we are a team, and I’m not going to let anyone fall by the wayside. We are all in this together.”
For Pat’s field staff, the biggest challenge that first day was often biding their time until a new start of care assignment came along and they could utilize the new EMR software. “The clinicians were eagerly awaiting that opportunity, but some didn’t get their first new patient until that afternoon,” she says. “I was receiving calls all day long asking, ‘when will I get a start of care?”
By week’s end, her clinical staff had all had handled multiple cases with the new EMR and were providing Pat with positive feedback. “The system is very comprehensive, and also is very good at ensuring everyone is in full compliance with their documentation,” she notes. “Since it’s new, it make a take a little more time to navigate at first, but the system is clear and precise.”
Pat gives special credit to the “wonderful consultants from Homecare Homebase” with making the launch a success. “They were very warm and receptive, so I felt comfortable asking them something that might sound ridiculous, or asking the same question two or three times because it’s all so new to me. That was important. At the end of the first day, we all did a high-five. We’d made it!”
Seana Mohammed, Home Care Nurse
To help ease the patient load of individual VNSNY Home Care clinicians during the Manhattan roll-out of Homecare Homebase, a number of nurses from other regions volunteered to shift over to Manhattan for the first two months with the new EMR system. Among them was Seana Mohammed, who ordinarily works in Home Care’s Queens region. “I’ve been seeing patients on Manhattans’s Upper East Side, and having a great time!” she says.
For Seana, the first week using Homecare Homebase was “a challenge initially, but not too bad. The start of care admission process took a little longer than usual, but basically, I’ve found the new system easy to navigate. It’s very intuitive.” She also feels that the small-group training she’d received in the new EMR, as well as the strong support she got from the VNSNY trainers themselves, helped prepare her to hit the ground running. “By the end of the first week, I was spending the same amount of time documenting admissions with Homecare Homebase as under the old system, and with additional practice I’ll be able to cut that time even further.” Her new patients have been partners in the roll-out, adds Seana. “They’re very intrigued by the fact I’m using a new software program and a new, smaller tablet.”
As she became more familiar with Homecare Homebase during the roll-out’s first week, Seana also found herself appreciating its advantages. “I like the fact that the OASIS intake is incorporated with the physical assessment, and that the system forces you to write your notes in real time—though you can still go back and fine-tune them later,” she says. “And the documentation is so accurate that you can clearly see in real time which goals are being met or not met, and why or why not. I also like being able to communicate with the schedulers via the case conference function, to let them know if there is a change in schedule. It’s all very straightforward.”
Another positive feature, she adds, is the ability of back office staff to scan some the actual referral documents into the EMR. “In the old system, we depended on the referral notes,” she says. “Now we have access to the actual the intake and referral documentation. I’ve been with VNSNY for ten years, and I’ve always said, ‘Why can’t we have everything in one place?’ With Homecare Homebase, we have that now.”
