What Happens When You Have ROI Downtime

[Brandi Boren]

For those of us who have worked in medical records or worked for a copy service long enough we know how nice is it that we don’t have to go pull a paper chart and make copies of each page like we used to do. We have the luxury of printing right out of the computer or putting it on a CD. That is all great until your ROI system goes down not only for a short period of time but for three weeks and then when it starts running again it goes down again for another few weeks. So what do you do at this point? Well I am about to tell you because we experienced this on several occasions.
It all started with the ROI system not being able to print or make CDs. We could still log requests, but nothing else. I put a ticket in with our support staff and they restarted servers and ended up putting a support ticket in with McKesson. At this point it was just a waiting game. Several days went by and nothing. We followed back up with McKesson and they tried this and that and we played phone tag and nothing was getting done. In the mean time ,while they were trying to figure out how to fix the problem, they did something and we couldn’t even log requests. By now our backlog was very high and we had RAC charts that had to go out ASAP. The stuff that didn’t have to go on disk or have to have a page count we printed out of HPF, but again we couldn’t log anything.
This was the second time that this had happened to us so we had no choice but to escalate this issue to the big boss. The CFO expedited this issue to the director of IT who expedited this issue to the McKesson people and lo and behold they got right on it. They were talking to me and to our IT guys and trying everything they could to get it back up and running. They cleaned out queues and restarted servers and all kinds of stuff and finally had it working again.
I can just tell you that this was all a big mess. As of right now it is working and hopefully it stays working. So I guess I will just close with if you want something done fast just get the senior staff to get the ball rolling or as my manager says you have to light a fire under someone’s behind.

Brandi Boren has worked for Jennie Stuart Medical Center in Medical Records for seven years and has four years experience with McKesson including Horizon Patient Folder, Paragon Medical Records, and Webstation for Physicians.