World Health Day Horror Story

I saw a post from Ioana Singureanu applauding #worldhealthday . I know I am connected to a number of people in the healthcare community, so I just had to share this story about how not to act when dealing with healthcare information. Once upon a time (March 2021) there was a clinic associated with a major hospital group. The hospital group required that the clinic change its EHR system. Red flag number 1 - none of the people working in the clinic were consulted regarding the system change. The transition was scheduled to start on a Monday. Red flag number 2 - When the clinicians asked why the transition did not take place over the weekend, ITs response was we don't work on weekends. And just to make things more interesting, the IT point of contact for the clinic was on vacation the week before the Monday start date. The transition started as scheduled on Monday. To the horror of the clinic staff, very little of the data from the old system was actually transferred to the new system. IT left the clinical staff the task of entering required information for hundreds of patients, causing the clinic to close to patients for 3 days. I don't know which systems were involved, but I am confident that I could have come up with a better outcome than this. When an authorization or a treatment note or some other piece of data is missing, who do you think gets blamed? This is a clear case of IT not being interested in supporting the business.