Standardization Sounds Simple. It Isn’t.
By Randy White, Senior Vice President of IT, U.S. Orthopaedic Partners
When we started down this path a couple of years ago, I don’t know that any of us fully appreciated what all would go into it.
This was not something we did from a distance. There were stretches where I was living in the communities our practices serve (me and my adopted dog, Dude) for weeks at a time, working alongside teams to help get each group across the line.
Now that we’ve been live across all 10 practices for more than a year, I’ve had some time to step back and look at it. It’s something I’m proud of, not just because we got it done, but because it is making a real difference for our physicians and our practices.
We also had a strong partner in ModMed. Their team stayed consistent with us throughout, learned how we operate, and worked alongside us as we figured this out together.
Looking back, here are a few things I learned.
It starts with physician leadership
You can have the system ready, the plan in place, and a good team around you. But if you don’t have physicians engaged in it, it’s going to be a challenge.
What I’ve seen is that it’s not enough to have general support. You need physician leadership, and you need folks willing to help bring others along, especially when habits and routines have been in place for a long time.
We saw that at Bienville, where the physicians were vocal and engaged. Not every comment was praise, and that’s all right. What mattered was that they cared enough to give feedback, work through the process, and help us get better. That kind of engagement is a big reason they have been successful with the product long term.
That part doesn’t change, no matter what system you’re working with.
Super users make the work last
One thing that helped us quite a bit was leaning on our own people.
As we moved from one practice to the next, we brought super users along. These were people who had already been through it and understood not just the system, but how we wanted to use it as an organization.
Emily Parker, Crystal Gary, and Tonya Cook from Bienville; Rebekah Moore from NABJC; Mikki White from Mississippi Sports Medicine in Tupelo; and Peggy Hubbard from Southern Orthopaedic Surgeons all deserve a lot of credit. They got engaged, became true super users, and volunteered their time to help other practices when they were going live.
That firsthand knowledge is hard to replace. They knew how the tool was actually being used in a clinic, not just how it looked in a training manual.
To me, that is the MSO model at its best. One practice learns something, then turns around and helps the next one.
Measure success by how you recover
Everybody focuses on go-live. That’s the part you can point to on a calendar.
What matters just as much is what happens after.
Every practice had its own challenges and successes. You expect to slow down some at first. The key is how you work your way back, adjust schedules, layer things back in, and keep refining what you’ve put in place.
We learned as we went. By the time we got to our last go-live, SportsMED in Huntsville, we had the best recovery we had seen in terms of getting back to normal schedule templates.
That came from learning, adjusting, and having the right people around the work.
Integration is where the complexity shows up
The EMR gets most of the attention, but it’s not the whole picture.
Once you start tying in other workflows, it adds another layer. You can build standards as you go, which helps in the long run, but it does make the initial rollout more complex.
One thing I’d tell anyone going through a new EMR is to think about the ancillaries early. If you have imaging, PT, DME, joint workflows, ProviderFlow, or other tools that need to connect, understand those needs and plan for them before you get too far down the road.
The order matters more than people think.
Standardization is what makes the MSO work
This is where you start to see the real benefit.
One of the core ideas behind an MSO is that practices can learn from each other, share what’s working, avoid what’s not, and improve together. That is hard to do if everyone is operating on different systems or if their use of the platform is not standardized.
This past April, we hosted a super user event in Jackson with more than 40 team members from across all 10 practices. We could not have done that in the same way before. The conversations, collaboration, and best practices shared that week will benefit every practice in our platform.
That same group will also help us onboard future practices. We are not starting from scratch anymore and own more of the process.
The ModMed trainers were there, too, taking notes and listening to feedback from our subject matter experts. That kind of input helps ModMed understand what enterprise groups like ours need, and it helps us continue improving the way we use the system.
That is what standardization makes possible. It gives us one shared way to work, one shared language, and one group of people helping all of us get better.
Data and consistency change how you operate
Another big shift has been on the data side.
We’ve gone from pulling information from a number of different systems to having one primary source. That allowed us to build PRISM, our internal business intelligence tool, in a cleaner and more useful way.
With one EMR across the platform, we can make better apples-to-apples comparisons. Practice leaders can benchmark against their peers, see where someone else is getting better results, and then follow up to learn what they are doing differently.
Again, that is why the MSO exists.
It sets the stage for what comes next
Now that we’re just over a year into this, we can spend more time focused on what we build on top of it or revisit the configuration to enhance performance.
We’ve been leveraging AI and automation for a long time. That is not new for us. But it is a different conversation when everyone is on the same EMR. It makes us more nimble and gives us a better way to test, learn, and apply solutions across the platform.
That matters from an enterprise and vendor perspective.
It shows up in data collection, business intelligence, revenue cycle, patient access, marketing, and more. When we find a solution that works, we are in a better position to roll it out at scale instead of rebuilding the process 10 different ways.
That is the real value of this foundation. It helps us operate better today and gives us a better way to improve tomorrow.
Final thought
If there’s one thing I’ve learned over time, it’s that this kind of work always comes back to people.
We had strong physician leaders, committed practice CEOs, smart team members across our practices, and a ModMed team that stayed with us throughout. A lot of people put in a lot of time to make this work, and I’m grateful for that.
I’ve been in IT a long time, in a lot of places, and I’ve learned there is no shortcut around good people doing hard work together. Systems matter. Data matters. Planning matters. But the work only lasts if people believe in it enough to keep making it better.
That is what I have seen across USOP.
We did not just install a system. We built a foundation that lets our practices work together, learn from each other, and move forward as one platform.
That is something worth being proud of.
But our innovation won’t stop there. We still have a lot more we continue to do with it.
Randy White is Senior Vice President of IT at U.S. Orthopaedic Partners, where he leads enterprise technology strategy across the platform and serves as USOP’s Security & Privacy Officer. With decades of experience in healthcare technology, operations, cybersecurity, data infrastructure, and system implementation, Randy helps ensure USOP’s practices have the tools, support, and visibility they need to operate effectively. His work spans EMR optimization, emerging technologies, network administration, vendor partnerships, and platform-wide innovation.