Thread by @chrischirp

THREAD: many of us in healthcare have seen new IT systems hailed as gamechangers. Many don't live up to their promise. Often failure is at final step of implementation - I interviewed people at 4 hospitals who all implemented the same IT system & developed these cartoons...

The hope is that they capture typical stories of what pitfalls happen in real life - and gives tips for how to avoid them! The full cartoons (and a downloadable booklet) are freely available from @nejmcatalyst catalyst.nejm.org/doi/full/10.10… but here are some with real quotes :-)

"Because it involved IT, even tho the CMO had signed off & we had his blessing & the promised resources & the contract, then we had to go through what we call the IT gov committee. Which is not a quick process, so we had to formally present this…and that took another 6 mnths"

Key tips for avoiding the barriers above!

"Our rooms are kind of small - they're small from the standpoint of where we could put the monitors - they're not in a good spot to be able to utilize them on rounds... I would say that that's part of the frustration is the location of some of the monitors is not the best place"

"Often it's like "ta-da, we got this new thing" and it's like "oh that's [MD’s] toy…versus "okay, we're going to implement this, we're all going to own it, it's going to meaningful to everyone so what do you think about it?"

"I kept pressing for smthng I could give the nurses to say these are guidelines for using this…. [docs] didn't have a whole lot of input as to what they expected bedside nurses to use it for. And it's not that we want to ignore it ... but we also want to know how is it useful.."

Read the full piece to see all the cartoons, the tips, and download the booklet which includes a checklist! catalyst.nejm.org/doi/full/10.10…
Work done with the great @DBatesSafety & @DAGoldmann, funded by @commonwealthfnd