At pMD, we have a foundation that has been built from over 20 years of experience working with employees with various backgrounds and working with customers from varying specialties and experiences. Throughout our 20 years in the industry, we’ve established a structure to ensure that our process to obtain new customers and keep existing ones happy is standardized, effective, and as efficient as it can be. Even after 20 years, we continue to stay open to learning new and better ways to improve our already proven process. This leads me to the question: what happens when an idea or plan doesn’t go the way you expect? Does it mean you’re set up for failure? No. In fact, sometimes when things don’t as planned, it might actually be for the better. So make lemonade with those lemons.

Recently, I was involved in an implementation that didn’t go as I had originally planned and it turned out to be one of the best implementations I had ever been a part of. One of our customers had been using pMD for a number of years for one of their many specialties. And for the past two years, we have been trying to expand our usage to other specialties within this large organization. As a team, we discussed what additionally we could provide to the already existing specialty to ensure their continued success with pMD, providing more leverage to expand to their other groups. We set out a plan to do some heavy customer outreach and made sure we spoke with not only the administration but, more importantly, with the providers themselves to get their feedback on how pMD was working for them so far. After all, they’re the ones who would know best on how the system is working. Through close account management, we were able to implement new, robust features to the existing group and get our foot in the door to finally expand to a new group.

Why was this implementation then so special? It started at the top. Leadership was heavily involved in the vetting and implementation of pMD. We followed our best practice of learning about the group and their workflow as well as speaking with and presenting to leadership and their physician champions. We were on the right path to go live with this new specialty group by the end of October. They expressed interest in wanting to do a trial run with a smaller subset of physicians and provide feedback before going live for the entire group. This process lasted 1-2 weeks before getting the green light to go live with the entire group. We also received feedback and made the appropriate adjustments with the idea that we were still on track to implement the new group by the end of October. However, when we discussed the go-live date, the group wasn’t comfortable to move forward with that timeframe because of scheduling conflicts and additional questions they had about the system. While it was a frustrating time for our team, we eventually came to implement the new group officially in December (over a month after the initial target date of October 2018). Surprisingly, after all the prior obstacles, the implementation went about as smoothly as any implementation I had ever been a part of.

A smooth implementation isn’t a result of magic. Leadership with this group took those extra weeks to very clearly communicate to their providers and staff as to why they were making the transition to pMD. When we came on-site the first week of December, we weren’t met with surprised looks or confused faces. Everyone we worked with was prepared and understood the ‘why’ behind the process. In the span of four days, our team was able to successfully get over 30 providers using pMD without a hitch.

It takes strong leadership and clear communication for new ideas to mature and to be adopted. Much like this implementation, pMD does the same. When our strategy doesn’t always necessarily go as planned, we adapt, we communicate the ‘how’ and ‘why’, and then we move forward with those changes. This implementation was also a great example of how pMD continues to grow its brand, starting from a long-time customer and expanding into its surrounding community. Since the implementation, we’ve added several more providers and expanded the use of a new product, pMD® Clinical Communication™, within this organization. So when things don’t go as planned, remember that better results might even come out of it.

Find out more about pMD's suite of products, which includes our MIPS registry, charge capture, secure messaging, clinical communication, and care navigation software and services, please contact pMD.

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