The big, doomed technology roll-out

Right now on my unit we are preparing to roll out a new computerized clinical documentation system, that’s right, my hospital is still documenting on paper.  And, I feel this is going to be a miserable failure.
My unit is going to be the pilot unit for acute care.  The date of rollout has been known for a good six months.  I have asked for the past three months when training will begin for superusers and for regular users.  I was told time after time that the training was still in development, and it would be entirely web-based training.

I felt from the first time I heard this that hands-on, face to face training with an instructor was more appropriate for such an important, far reaching implementation.  I was told that I don’t know what I am talking about and that this training would be sufficient enough.

Did I mention that this is from the IT guys, not from nursing?  There were no informatics nurses on the development or implementation teams.  They used nurses to test the system, without any training, and took their feed back to make changes.  Those changes were to the operation of the system, not what could be done to make the clinical interface more appropriate for nursing.

Well, we start next week and the training started last week…two weeks of training.  It is all web-based like I was promised it would be, and it is full of flaws.  The training alone is difficult to navigate, so you can image how the actual program is.

I am frustrated, concerned and angry that I was not listened to.  But this is why I am going to graduate school for informatics, to make things like this work for nursing and make IT and nursing work together.

Ahhhhh….the life of a nurse manager!