Katlyn Graham: Hello. I'm Katlyn Graham, here with Andy Cole, the director of financial implementations at Community Hospital Advisors. Welcome, Andy.
Andy Cole: Thank you. Glad to be here.
Katlyn: Thanks for joining this podcast. This podcast is called "Stop the Press: Paragon Breaks Your Paper Habit." This is talking about when hospitals convert to Paragon. What is one of the hardest things people give up when they move to Paragon, Andy?
Andy: I think what usually happens is...Paragon is a hospital information system that replaces, in many times, 20 to 30‑year‑old computer systems. Those systems relied on physical paper reports being printed daily, weekly, to certain folks and people working for those reports.
Paragon replaces all of that. They make those old paper reports obsolete by, actually, storing the data in the system and displaying the data real time to whoever needs it.
It's really one of the situations, where the users in the hospital that are using Paragon are so used to having stacks and stacks of reports. Once that goes away, it's almost like their security blanket goes away. They think they don't know how to do their job anymore because they don't have that old report.
Our job is to show them that, "You don't need that report anymore. Just because it's printing on your printer every day, it doesn't mean that you needed that report to do your job. The data's still there." This is the new way to do it and to show them it's not that scary.
Those old paper reports are usually the hardest thing for a lot of folks to give up, within a Paragon install.
Katlyn: I would think so. That's a huge cultural change. As you've said earlier, breaking that paper habit with the reports, who especially usually has trouble with the report issue in hospitals?
Andy: What I call report anxiety...The typical users, or the areas in the hospitals that have those troubles are physicians, nurses, and patient accounting directors and finance departments.
Those are your typical trouble spots. Oddly enough those are the departments that can make or break a Paragon implementation. It's really important to have a good offense with those folks early on in the install process. You've got to pay some special attention to those showing them that it's easy to run reports out of Paragon.
They are just as robust if not more then their older ports. There's usually not a good reason to print out that report. Once a report is printed, the data on that report is obsolete. That's how it was at the time of printing, not necessarily right now.
Getting on board early, having that reporting conversation upfront in the install is the key to keeping those trouble spots on board.
Katlyn: I would think using it, the nurse is used to holding her clipboard or whatever and has to switch over. Doing it and losing the paper would help. What do you find is usually the turning point with report anxiety?
Andy: To get over that anxiety, time and repetition is all you can do to get there. The earlier we get in front of those groups and show them where the reports are and once they start testing the system way before going live.
If they wait until after go live to look at reports it's way too late. That anxiety is not going to go away. It's probably going to get worse.
If they start testing, printing their reports or viewing those reports online, that will slowly go away. Slowly we see their evolvement from "You know what, why did I print that report from the old system?" or "You know, I don't need that report anymore."
That's the light bulb that goes off. If that can happen earlier on in the process with those trouble spots that'll spread throughout the hospital, and make everybody a lot happier. To make the go live a lot smoother and save those trees and save those printers from printing off totally unnecessary reports.
Katlyn: Thank you so much for explaining that, Andy. It sounds like you're helping reduce report anxiety in hospitals all over.
Andy: Great, thank you.