Making the Switch for Little Company of Mary
It’s like a well-choreographed wedding ceremony. After a courtship and, in this case, relatively brief engagement, Little Company of Mary Hospital and Health Care Centers in Evergreen Park, Illinois, is now, officially, OSF HealthCare Little Company of Mary Medical Center.
At the stroke of midnight February 1, the systems that powered everything at Little Company of Mary were converted to OSF systems. The initial push to get everything up and running took about 2-and-a-half hours, but will take much longer for everyone – and everything – to get settled comfortably into place.
It’s a process that takes months of planning and involves more than 1,000 people across the OSF Ministry. But when you’re having to take care of patients during the transition – there were more than 200 patients at switchover, not including those coming into the emergency department – you can’t to miss a beat. It’s a finely tuned process.
“We’re converting close to 600-700 different systems, bringing all of those systems live at one given time. It’s kind of an anomaly. It means taking everything from every department within the organization and changing it, which also means training, education around the systems but even the technical cut which is really the things that happen starting from about noon on the day prior all the way through the wee hours of the morning which we’re at now, really takes a tremendous amount of coordination and effort because there’s a lot of sequence of events and a lot of pieces that have to occur to ensure that patient safety is kept to the highest a degree possible along with keeping all of our systems functioning effectively,” explained Jim Mormann, CEO, Integrated Solutions and Chief Information Officer for OSF HealthCare.
It’s Mormann’s job to make sure conversions such as this go smoothly. And three hours after cutover, he was cautiously pleased.
One of the areas he worries most about is the pharmacy.
“Hats off to the pharmacy staff because it's always ones of the hardest jobs, here is to validate all of the pharmacy orders but then crosscheck, ensuring all of that stuff is 100% accurate. And then from there actually keeping track from the time we actually take systems down, they actually have to maintain that until we bring systems back live. So it’s a tremendous amount of work.”
Members of the integrated solutions team and others will remain onsite for the next several weeks, even months, to make sure everything is running smoothly and that the new OSF Little Company of Mary Mission Partners are comfortable with them – it’s called being at the elbow.
Ultimately, it’s the patients who will benefit most.
Learn more about OSF HealthCare Little Company of Mary Medical Center.
OSF HealthCare Little Company of Mary Medical Center is comprised of 2,100 Mission Partners (employees), committed to serving the southwest Chicago area. Operating 12 unique facilities, including a 252-bed acute care hospital, Little Company of Mary has strong community connections and robust service offerings.
OSF HealthCare is an integrated health system owned and operated by The Sisters of the Third Order of St. Francis, headquartered in Peoria, Illinois. OSF HealthCare employs more than 23,600 Mission Partners in 147 locations, including 14 hospitals – nine acute care, four critical access – with 2,097 licensed beds, and two colleges of nursing throughout Illinois and Michigan. The OSF HealthCare physician network employs more than 1,500 primary care, specialist and advanced practice providers. OSF HealthCare, through OSF Home Care Services, operates an extensive network of home health and hospice services. It also owns Pointcore, Inc., comprised of health care-related businesses; OSF HealthCare Foundation, the philanthropic arm for the organization; and OSF Ventures, which provides investment capital for promising health care innovation startups. More at https://www.osfhealthcare.org.