Implementation Matters: Part 2 Bringing Our Core Values to Customer Onboarding

1upHealth’s core values are Bold, Resolute, Human, and Visionary. The 1upHealth Implementation team strives to exude all of these core values and thensome in our approach to every customer engagement. In fact, multiple members of the Implementation team were recognized with 2024 Core Value Awards at this year’s company offsite – known as Spring Smash.

Our Implementation team is made up of 14 talented individuals spread across the US, all with diverse healthcare project management and/or technical backgrounds. We have folks whose resumes include time with prominent EHR vendors, digital health startups, life sciences organizations, payers, and medium to large health systems. They bring all this experience to bear as they work with our customers to get them onboarded in a timely, efficient, and thoughtful manner.  

Educating customers and setting the stage for the future of FHIR

Many members of the 1upHealth Implementation team have been with the company since the days when health plans were first tasked with converting claims, provider directories, and formularies to FHIR, as regulated by the CMS Interoperability and Patient Access final rule (CMS-9115-F).

Back then, few customers were familiar with the FHIR standard, with many thinking it referred to the heat source. The Implementation team spent a fair amount of time educating and getting our clients up to speed on what the FHIR format was, how it will revolutionize health data exchange, and how to spread the word within their organizations to enable better change management.

And, since the standard itself is designed to be flexible and adaptable to allow for use broadly across various healthcare settings and systems, members of the 1upHealth Implementation team worked closely with our Product and Engineering teams to create a 1upHealth FHIR point of view, which we continue to use to this day to guide our customer implementations. 

With FHIR adoption still in its infancy, this effort is not straightforward and requires bold, visionary forethought to ensure that the data can be used in meaningful ways for future use cases.  

Cultivating and imparting best practices developed over 80+ implementations

When customers sign with 1upHealth, they’re assigned an Implementation Manager (“IM”) and Data Engineers (“DEs”). The IM guides the customer’s project team through the implementation step by step – managing expectations, providing meeting notes, and keeping an audit trail of all decisions and actions for the team’s reference – while the DEs dive deep into the data with the customer’s technical teams to ensure their source data is comprehensive and can create meaningful FHIR resources. 

Years of experience coupled with deep industry knowledge have provided the team with valuable lessons, informing our standard implementation practices and processes and allowing us to build a playbook of best practices which we impart to our customers as we implement 1upHealth solutions together. 

The team approaches each project as an opportunity to employ best practices and cultivate our growing garden of implementation knowledge, which we can continue to impart to our growing customer base.

Delivering high quality service and data – on time

The main goals of every Implementation team member are to ensure that our customers receive the utmost level of service, projects are completed on time, and the data we convert to FHIR can be virtually stamped with a data quality seal. We use our experience and lessons learned throughout the years to establish implementation processes that bring learnings to the customers earlier on in the project, so that surprise last-minute questions and issues that have caused delays in the past can be avoided. 

All driven by a solid implementation philosophy

1upHealth’s 14-member implementation team follows a very specific implementation strategy based on a philosophy that is well-ingrained in new employee training and beyond. In Part 3 of this “Implementation Matters” blog series, I’ll cover 1upHealth’s implementation philosophy in a nutshell.

This blog is part of a series. Read Part 1 now.

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