I’ve recently been asked a few times: “How does Practice Fusion decide what to work on next?” With the high volume of user requests for new features and internal plans for enhancing our Electronic Medical Record system – prioritizing our projects and keeping the EMR system moving forward can be a big challenge.
Practice Fusion uses Scrum to manage our incremental development. If you work in software, you likely know all about Scrum. For the rest of us, Scrum is an agile project management process. Developed in Japan, Scrum creates a flexible, fast way for teams to move forward on large projects.
Our business and project management team regularly meet to create “sprints” – a period of several weeks with clearly defined project goals. Each sprint includes a balance of large and small projects, plus a group of user-requested features that have been identified as top priorities. During the sprint, the team has quick daily meetings to talk about their status and larger “burndown” meetings to track what’s left to do. The sprint ends with the release of new features to our EMR community. And then we do it all over again!
I’ve been in a Scrum crash-course for the past two weeks as we worked to implement the project management system across the marketing department. Along with my co-director, I’ve become a “ScrumMaster” for our team of six. We’re about to complete our first sprint on Monday, named Sprint Zakhari in honor of latest case study with house-call practitioner Raymond Zakhari.
I’ve really come to appreciate the organization that Scrum brings to our team. We’re able to move forward very quickly on large projects while also balancing those daily urgent requests that always seem to pop-up. If you’re interested in learning more about Scrum, I recommend this 10 minute video explanation:
Scrum could also be an effective tool for managing projects inside medical practices. Especially as a practice tries to balance a full case-load of patients while also switching to a new technology, such as an Electronic Medical Record. Each member of the practice would know exactly what they need to do over a few weeks (ie: complete 2 hours of training, import patient records into the system, document 5 patient visits on the system), would have the hours set aside to do it and would be working toward a larger roadmap for full EMR adoption.
Do you use Scrum? What do you think of the project management system? Could it really work inside a busy medical practice?
Emily Peters
Director of Communications
Practice Fusion
