Thursday, September 13, 2007

We have liftoff!

Today was kind of a big day in the grand scheme of my graduate work. Why? Because today my alerts went into production in the Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system at Intermountain Healthcare. The crazy part is that no one actually told me about it. I was kind of running out of steam on some writing I've been working on this afternoon, and while killing some time, I decided to just send an email and ask when the latest release of the system software was going to happen. Last I'd heard it was schedule for Aug. 29th, and then that didn't happen. All I knew was that things had been pushed back. Anyway, I got a quick response saying that the release had happened early this morning (around 1 am). I was, of course, pleased to hear that my code had made it into production, something that at one point I thought might never happen.

So then I decided I better track down the programmer I'd been working with on this project to find out what I needed to do to turn my alerts on. When I finally did find him, he told me that yes, the release happened last night, and my alerts were working fine. What? I thought I had to "turn them on" once the new release was in place. Not so. In fact, at that point, two alerts had already been sent. Which I guess was a good thing. It was just all a little fast. I had told the providers I'd email them to let them know when we were turning the alerts on, so I had to scramble and put that together and mention that they'd started going out earlier today, so to keep an eye for them.

Anyway, I'm a little nervous about the whole situation, but overall I'm very excited to have the system up and running.

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