Launching a new mobile technology in a hospital is a high-stakes operation. With patient care on the line, there can be no margin of error. This is even more essential this year—our customers who are launching new technology or updating existing tools are potentially doing so under the significant strain of a pandemic, so their go-lives need to be executed with practiced precision.

As a Senior Project Manager with years of EHR and CC&C implementations under my belt, I’ve gotten pretty good at identifying the traits and processes that can make or break a hospital go-live. Above all, the vendor’s go-live processes should be well-documented and iterative in order to keep the customer experience airtight.

At Mobile Heartbeat, our implementation process is customized for each customer. One of the secrets to our go-live success is our demonstrated value for optimizing workflows. This doesn’t just include customers’ clinical workflows as part of our clinical discovery process—we have made it an essential function of our team to scrutinize each step in our own processes, with the goal of continuous improvement.

A More Agile Retrospective

We have recently formalized the final steps of our go-live process in the form of project retrospectives, an Agile technique that has been adapted to our team.

Here’s how it works: Before the go-live (whether in-person or remote), your Mobile Heartbeat team members will provide a detailed timeline of events leading up to and through launch/go-live, as well as an optional survey for users. During and immediately after the go-live, your Project Manager will collect some early structured feedback from your team—evaluating every step of the implementation process from design, build, testing and more—and use that to draft a templated retrospective qualifying the go-live.

The retrospective itself includes a list of participating team members and their roles, the milestone dates on the project timeline, integration and third-party vendor information, and finally, successes and challenges. The retrospective then is shared with the Mobile Heartbeat team, including those at additional facilities in the customer’s system, to inform future go-lives and upgrades in the organization.

Iterating Toward Precision

What is the purpose of launching a retrospectives initiative? Perhaps the Agile Alliance says it best: “A retrospective is intended to reveal facts or feelings which have measurable effects on the team’s performance, and to construct ideas for improvement based on these observations.” Formalizing our retrospectives in this way ensures that these facts and feelings are shared every time to maximize impact.

That being said, our goal in maintaining an iterative process like this is to provide regular opportunities to build the best possible experience for customers and users.

Our team has already implemented this new process in tandem with our remote go-live support initiative, which we launched last month. Through COVID-19, which is still overwhelming many healthcare organizations both large and small, our customers have still been able to rely on a well-documented and communicative process that helps them achieve their operational goals without added strain on their teams.

The Customer-Centric Approach

This initiative is just one way that we keep our customers at the forefront of our work. While we have always valued the collaboration of our customers and users, we see this retrospectives initiative placing an even larger emphasis on our customers’ feedback in the future.

By completing these retrospectives for all go-lives and upgrades moving forward, we’re better able to share successes and optimize our own workflows, in addition to those of our customers.