CST is coming... Are you ready?

Meet three VCH-Vancouver CST champs

Our CST provider champions are playing a critical role as VCH-Vancouver prepares for go-live in 2020.

They’re physicians, psychiatrists, nurse practitioners, dentists and clinical pharmacists.

They’re our CST provider champions, and they’re playing a critical role as VCH-Vancouver acute, ambulatory, inpatient mental health and VCH owned and operated long-term care sites prepare to go live with CST Cerner in mid-2020.

VCH-Vancouver’s 45 CST provider champions represent their clinical area in the design, build and workflow validation of the CST Cerner clinical information system. They’ll also facilitate peer engagement and assist with go-live support and sustainment after CST implementation.

Here’s what three of them have to say about this once-in-a-lifetime project transforming patient care in B.C:

Changing for the better

Dr. Titus Wong, Regional Medical Director of Infection Control, works primarily out of VGH and has been involved with CST since its early days. He was on the ground for go-live at Lions Gate Hospital in 2018 and is using the experience to prepare and manage expectations for VCH-Vancouver’s implementation.

“Any change of course is intimidating to a certain degree,” he acknowledges, “but we have to keep our focus on the incredible opportunities that this change brings and go at it with a lens of optimism and finding creative solutions, as opposed to only picking out potential problems.”

Ensuring a smooth transition

Nurse Practitioner Bonnie Giovennetti spent 11 years in Neurosurgery. After helping to write Neurosurgery order sets for CST several years ago, she’s now involved with the project again as a nurse practitioner champion. As part of her role, she represents nurse practitioners to ensure a smooth transition to CST. This includes getting them up and running with front-end speech recognition (FESR) as soon as possible.

“FESR has improved dictation and access to dictations by at least 75 per cent,” says Bonnie. “My colleagues have been very impressed: type, dictate … and our words are recorded, accessible and usable right away.”

Putting patients first

Psychiatrist Dr. Ram Randhawa has been with VCH since 2004, and works at VGH Psychiatry Outpatient Services as well as the Sleep Disorders Centre at UBC Hospital. He was also at Lions Gate Hospital during their CST go-live and says the ultimate goal is making sure that patients remain the priority. The best system, he says, is the one that disappears and allows you to focus on what you’re there to do: look after the patient.

“As I started getting more involved with CST, I found so many interesting things in the project, and not just in terms of the technology and how that was going to change the way we operate in the hospital, but also the opportunity to come together as a community in the way we treat patients,” says Ram. “It’s been quite a remarkable experience so far.”

Refer to our VCH-Vancouver CST website here for the complete list of all VCH-Vancouver provider champions.

Learn more about CST in VCH-Vancouver

Accessible anywhere you are – at VCH, on the go, or at your office or clinic – VCH-Vancouver’s CST website is your go-to resource for everything CST. To access outside the VCH network, log in with your domain\username and password (just like logging into VCH webmail).

Visit today: VCH-Vancouver CST website