The podcast by project managers for project managers. A project story about a massive initiative focused on an EPIC implementation at University Hospitals in Cleveland. Hear why this project to streamline patient information, enhance care, and improve operations has the tagline "Best Implementation of all time."

Table of Contents

04:29 … University Hospitals of Cleveland05:11 … The EPIC Integration07:18 … The Size of the Initiative09:51 … The Cost11:21 … Convey Calmness and the Right Mindset14:47 … The Guiding Principles18:38 … “Best implementation of all time.”21:48 … Kevin and Kyle23:17 … Risk Management28:09 … Time to Pivot31:31 … Big Bang Go Lives32:41 … Project Team Selection34:23 … Enterprise Program Management Office Perspective35:54 … PMO Resources38:15 … Takeaways from the Project42:56 … Find out More44:03 … Update44:36 … Closing

WENDY GROUNDS:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  My name is Wendy Grounds, and with me in the studio is Bill Yates and Danny Brewer, our sound guy.  Thank you so much for joining us today. 

We have three guests, which is something new for us, and we’re quite excited to have a really full house on the Zoom studio today.  Our first guest is Sami Othman.  He is an operations and IT leader who designs and executes breakthrough IT solutions that optimize financial performance and efficiency in organizations.  Sami is currently the IT leader assigned to the effort of the project that we’re going to tell you about today.  He’s leading the transformative initiative to move University Hospitals of Cleveland to an integrated electronic health record system.  This is what they call Epic, and it is certainly an epic 600 million investment project that will standardize all hospitals into a common system and streamlining processes and consolidating one patient record.

Another person involved on this project is Lora Niazov, and she’s currently the director of the Enterprise Program Management Office at University Hospitals. Lora has also just become is an Adjunct Instructor of Project Management at the John Carroll University  She has over 20 years of experience in healthcare, information technology, and manufacturing industries.

And then the other person on the project is Gubran Ahmed, and he is an experienced program management office leader with demonstrated success and strength in strategic planning, process improvement and problem solving, change management, and relationship building across many functional areas in organizations.  Currently Gubran is working at University Hospitals and is leading the Enterprise Program Management Office with a portfolio carrying a budget of over $200 million, encompassing 150 active projects.  And he tells us a little bit about that, as well, in the podcast.

BILL YATES:  Yeah.  Yeah he does.  And all three guests are going to provide a unique perspective on what they’re doing with this massive program and how they’re seeing it unfold.  And this is big.

WENDY GROUNDS:  This is Epic.

BILL YATES:  This is Epic.  The name of the software is so appropriate.  There are 29,000 users.  We’re talking 22 terabytes of data and 3 million patient records that are a part of this conversion and implementation.  I can’t wait to get into it, hear some of the nitty-gritty from them, and hear some of their takeaways, their advice from implementation of this size.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Yeah, their project tagline is “Best implementation of all time.”  We really do think so.

BILL YATES:  Yeah, I can’t wait for our listeners to weigh in and say, “Yeah, that does sound like it.”  Or “No, mine’s better.  I’m going to tell Wendy about it.”

WENDY GROUNDS:  Yes.  And listeners, if you have an epic project, if you are working on a project that you think the story is worth sharing, that you’ve got some incredible lessons learned, or you’ve got a project that you think you’d like our audience to hear about, please reach out to us.  Lora sent me an email, and here we are.  So we’re happy to hear from you.

BILL YATES:  There you go.  That’s right.

WENDY GROUNDS: Lora shared some exciting news with us as well, that the University Hospital Department of Enterprise Program Management has just won PMIs top 3 PMOs in the world!  They are going to be in Atlanta at the end of October to see if they are winners of the PMO of the year award. Take a look out for that if you’re following the PMI event at the end of the month.

If you listen up at the end of the show, I am going to give you an update from Lora on their EPIC program and how their “Go Live” is going. So take a listen at the end of the show.

Now, because we have three special guests today, I am going to welcome them each personally.  So first of all, my first contact was Lora.  Lora, welcome to Manage This.

LORA NIAZOV:  Hello.  Thank you so much for having me.  I am very excited to be here.  I listen to this podcast all the time. And I also share it with my team.  And I appreciate you making a little bit of time for us.  Thank you.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Sami, thank you so much for joining us today.  Welcome to Manage This.

SAMI OTHMAN:  Oh, thank you so much for having me.  I look forward to our time together today.  I think we’re going to have a lot of fun together.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Yeah.  We’re excited to hear about this project.  And last but not least, Gubran, thank you very much for being part of Manage This.

GUBRAN AHMED:  Hi there.  Thanks for having us.  I’m looking forward to the conversation, as well.

University Hospitals of Cleveland

WENDY GROUNDS:  So we’re going to jump right in.  And I want you to just set the scene for us of the story of this project.  Tell us about University Hospitals of Cleveland.  How many hospitals and ambulatory locations does this include?

GUBRAN AHMED:  The University Hospitals has been around for more than 155 years.  It has the mission of healing, teaching, and discovering.  And we roughly have a network of 21 hospitals.  That includes five joint ventures, more than 50 health centers and outpatient facilities, and we have over 200 physician offices in 16 counties throughout Northeast Ohio.

WENDY GROUNDS:  This project is encompassing all of that?

GUBRAN AHMED:  Yes, that includes everything.

The EPIC Integration

WENDY GROUNDS:  So now you’ve been working on this huge initiative.  You’ve been implementing an integrated electronic health record system, which you call Epic.  Can you describe Epic to us?

LORA NIAZOV:  Yeah.  So it’s been a wonderful journey.  A little bit about Epic.  It was started by Judith Faulkner in 1979.  It’s a privately held company.  What I find fascinating is that everybody always talks about Steve Jobs and Apple.  And there’s very little buzz about Judith, when really she was a software developer herself.  She started the company in her basement.  It’s a multi-billion dollar organization right now.  The leading hospitals of the world use this software to take care of patients.  It’s a pretty fantastic story from a female leader in software development, especially from the ‘70s.

So what Epic does is it provides an integrated health record system for all of patient data across your entire patient journey and story, whether it’s surgery or a visit with your primary care provider or whatever it may be.  It holds all of your information, and then you can share it across different hospital systems to enable continuity of care for you.  So that’s what we’re implementing.

BILL YATES:  This is so important.  And then thinking about the complexity of that many health centers, that many offices, that many doctors that have to be coordinated.

It is fascinating to me though, Lora, that the company started in 1979.  Just think of all the evolutions that they’ve made.  And it’s amazing that they were obviously able to take on new technology and figure out how do we implement this and still abide by HIPAA and all those things.  And they’re still a successful company and still the market leader today.  That really does speak to their longevity.

LORA NIAZOV:  Yeah, it’s a wonderful place.  They’re based in Wisconsin.  They have over 10,000 employees.  We’ve met many of them, I feel like, at this point, with our implementation.

BILL YATES:  All 10,000, yeah.

LORA NIAZOV:  Yes.  And they have a wonderful fun culture being a software developer, and it’s been a wonderful journey.  We’re lucky that we get to partner with this amazing software.  It’s been a long time coming.

The Size of the Initiative

WENDY GROUNDS:  Can you give us a sense of the size of this initiative?  For example, tell us a little bit about the schedule and the budget and the number of people that are going to be expected to use Epic.

SAMI OTHMAN:  Yeah, sure thing.  So if we back up a little bit and start from the beginning of this program, the board of directors of University Hospitals Cleveland approved this program, the UH Epic program, back in December of 2020.  And then, once we kicked off the new year in 2021, we focused on getting contracts signed with Epic and with our implementation advisor.  So that occurred in that first quarter of 2021.

During the course of the middle year of 2021, we focused our efforts on standing up the actual program team, which is primarily made up of our IT resources.  So we leverage our own resources and just literally transition them over to the UH Epic program team.  So that process took place over the course of a few months.  We kicked off the actual program October of 2021, culminating with the final Go Live, which is scheduled for September 30th of this year.

Now, the first Go Live that we had was March of this year, and it was primarily focused on our primary care practices.  But September 30th really is the rest of the health system.  So all of the hospitals and clinics that Gubran had mentioned earlier,