University of Alabama

The University of Alabama’s GME office, responsible for 980 residents and fellows and 1,550 faculty, relied on MedHub to lift the veil on cumbersome manual processes

Life-Changing Transparency

Five full-time and two part-time staff members in the Hospital’s GME office who are responsible for 980 residents and fellows and 1,550 faculty can still recall the challenges of working in a paper world. Yet today, after implementing MedHub in July 2014, they can’t imagine life without the technology platform that lifted the veil on cumbersome manual processes. And who can blame them, with 91 programs (83 ACGME accredited) to coordinate among Birmingham based University of Alabama and 4 other affiliated GME sponsoring institutions.

“The complete transparency MedHub provides is life-altering for us,” says Accreditation Coordinator Karley Nemeth. “Instead of having to go to several different sources for each program, each trainee, each schedule, reports are just a few clicks away—so much faster and easier.”

In addition to information sharing and speed, the enterprise solution has eliminated manual data entry, which according to Nemeth, “… guarantees accuracy for ACGME reporting. Plus, I can’t begin to imagine how much paper we’re saving not having to print out information.” The paper savings transcend all areas, including moonlighting requests, and the annual program evaluation process.

Successful, All-In Rollout

Optimism about MedHub prevailed in making the decision to go all-in for training everyone involved in the system’s use. “We weren’t shy about sharing our enthusiasm and I guess you could say, ‘We put our money where our mouth was.’ As a result, we conducted a rigorous rollout with training for all nearly 100 participating programs (including a few non-GME programs that recognized MedHub’s advantages),” said GME Office Manager Jason Bains. “And while change is typically challenging when it comes to technology, our users soon grasped the efficiency benefits and how easy MedHub is to use, which continues to drive usage numbers North.”

MedHub’s growing popularity is no doubt the reason behind the undergraduate medical education (UME) program’s adoption of the system last year.

Future

When commenting about the GME program’s future use of MedHub, Bains says, “We know this is just the tip of the iceberg. We’re planning to transform our onboarding process from paper to electronic. It will be much easier for applicants, of which a larger number are Millenials who we’re finding just expect everything to be available online. An initiative to implement the billing/finance portion of MedHub is also underway to create a more efficient process that will save us a lot of time by reducing duplication, and result in more accurate reporting.”