A guide to seamlessly changing care management platforms and ensuring a smooth implementation phase.
So, you’ve needed-to, or decided-to, switch care management platforms and have undergone the careful process of choosing a great new alternative. Congratulations! Or alternatively, if you are still assessing your options, see our free digital transformation guide to help you in your quest!
After selecting a new software solution for your business, it's important to prepare for successful implementation and replacement. No matter your timeframe, it's essential to avoid wasting any time and start with proper preparation. This will ensure that the change, migration, and training can be tackled effectively. Below are some tips on how to get started.
Setting up a project team
To ensure a successful implementation, you need to establish a project team that is dedicated to the task and has the necessary resources and governance to move the project forward effectively and efficiently. This team will be responsible for making key decisions throughout the implementation and should meet regularly to evaluate progress.
An experienced software vendor will have the necessary structures and resources to support your project team in implementing the software.
Change Management
Replacing your software will be a big change for the employees within your business. Clear, positive and coordinated communication from the project team is essential to ensure that all employees and potential users are kept in the loop.
Creating a centralised place for internal communications regarding the change is a great step towards positive change management. Such as a dedicated slack channel, project board or similar, so that everyone can ask questions and find out the right information.
Fear of change often comes from the unknown, so keeping your team informed and ahead of time will help reduce resistance and hesitation to the change. Also, communicating the ‘why’ and the ‘upcoming benefits’ often, encourages excitement, buy-in and optimism for the changes.
Data Prep, Clean and Migration
The data preparation and migration process is one of the more complex and time-consuming aspects of changing software vendors, but is also the most critical. You want to start it as early as possible and do it right, so you can reap the benefits of your new software platform as fast as possible, and as smoothly as possible.
An experienced software vendor with a dedicated onboarding team will help educate and guide you in this process, and provide the documents required to start collating all the important data for the migration.
Through the process of extracting and setting up the data, you’ll find you might be missing data, or some of the data requires updating … this is actually a good thing. The data migration process is a great exercise in cleaning and updating your data, which can vastly improve your business outcomes on the new system.
Once you have extracted and set up all the data you need, your software vendor will show-you, or help-you to, upload it into their new system.
In some cases, you may like to hire outside assistance to help fast-track the data migration stage, particularly if resources are stretched.
Optimising Adoption
Training is the key to increasing adoption by your team and new users. Ideally, you want to develop a detailed training plan, and track attendance for each member of your team.
An experienced software vendor will help you develop a plan and have a range of learning options available for your team, including self-paced learning content, and if budget allows, virtual or in-person training options.
In conclusion, transitioning to a new care management software platform can be seen as a daunting task. However, with proper planning, preparation, and communication, you can ensure a smooth and successful implementation of your new software solution.
Follow the steps outlined in this guide, and you will be on your way to a seamless transition to your new software solution that will provide benefits for years to come!
Make the switch to Lookout and get set up in less than 3 months! Find out more.