Interview Story - Overcame a Challenge

When I was an Implementation Consultant at Cerner Corporation I was partnered with a client healthcare system to draft the specifications for implementing an electronic medical records system (EMR). The system was to be implemented across their facility organizations (hospitals, clinics) and their locations (nursing units, outpatient departments, etc).

There were a total of 7 acute hospitals in the network and the configuration needed to be uploaded at the same time to enable other teams to start their application designs. The client leadership had already approved my portion of the configuration when the client announced two weeks prior to the start of unit testing that my configuration needed to be reworked because the specs were based on incorrect data gathered during the design phase.

The incorrect configuration was already impacting other team’s configurations in progress before mine. So it was imperative to make the corrections as quickly as possible to minimize the impact on the project timeline. This could easily have set back the project by four weeks.

To address the situation I consulted the project leadership to get a consensus on the specific changes needed. I then documented those changes in Excel workbooks and obtained formal approval. I then needed to convert the Excel files to a format that could be uploaded to the EMR database.

I advised the client it would take about 7 days to complete these changes, to give the other teams sufficient time to make their changes. Since the client could not perform the upload it was up to me and Cerner.

To expedite this process, I met with project management and my direct manager to get buy-in to bring in an additional member from my Department to assist me. Working with my colleague we were able to complete the upload with time for the client leadership to bless it and then turn it over to the other teams to make their necessary workflow changes.

As a result, the configuration changes were completed less than 3 weeks after the initial issue was identified, and unit testing was able to proceed on schedule as laid out in the project plan.