Jen Underwood, System Director of Informatics & Systems for Aspirus, a non-profit, community directed health system with more than 7,700 employees, and serves communities throughout northern and central Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Jen talks about Aspirus’s journey and strategy with Infor Lawson and how they look to RPI Consultants for thought leadership and expansions.
Jen Underwood:
I’m Jen Underwood. I’m the System Director of Informatics and Systems for Aspirus, Inc in Wisconsin. Aspirus is an eight hospital, 50 plus clinic system that is based in North Central Wisconsin and the UP of Michigan.
Jen Underwood:
In my role as Supply Chain Director, I and the team work with the data and we pull a lot of analytical information. We look at information from not only Lawson, but also Epic to help our business partners make good decisions.
Jen Underwood:
One of the initiatives that we have worked very closely with RPI on is developing what we refer to as the brain in Lawson, as it’s sort of a silly icon that Lawson refers to as LBI. Within LBI, or the brain, our users are able to access many reports so that those reports are standardized at their fingertips and it just gives them access to the information that they need to make the best decisions in their day-to-day work.
Jen Underwood:
We initially partnered with RPI to standardize Lawson through the Aspirus system. We were not utilizing Lawson in a standard way at all within our eight hospitals, so we partnered with RPI. We worked together to come up with a project plan for standardizing Lawson throughout the system, and then we implemented that plan. It took us a few years. It was very trying at times because change is hard and we wanted to ensure that we were giving our end users the best possible technology and solution, but we are happily standardized now and able to move on to other challenges.
Jen Underwood:
Our relationship with RPI is great. They’re like an extension of our Aspirus team. When we have a question, we can reach out to them and get our questions answered right away. If we have a big project, we like to bounce things off of them immediately just to get their ideas. If we notice that there’s something in Lawson we’re not using today, we send the question out to the RPI team and ask for their expertise to gain a better understanding of it before we move forward.
Jen Underwood:
We have another hospital that will be joining the Lawson portion of our systems, so we have a lot to do and we really look forward to partnering with RPI for those new initiatives.