Cerner Blood Bank Validations with Incremental Upgrades vs Major Release Upgrades

[maureen320]

Hello All,

Now that Cerner has migrated from major release upgrades to incremental upgrades, how are you managing the Blood Bank validation effort?

We have not yet received any guidance from Cerner and at this point we feel that we will need to make the determination to validate on our own.

How are you some of you handling this?

Thank you!

Respectfully yours,

Maureen Slackway, MS, MT(ASCP), CPHIMS, CQA, CAPM

Senior Application Analyst – Laboratory Systems, Universal Health Services, Inc.

[David Saikin]

You would need to validate any changes that could impact how your system functions.

[carolyn swickard]

Oh bless you - this is what Meditech does.  We have to evaluate each "update" that comes along (several per year!!) and see if it affects Blood Bank programming.  If it is largely associated with another module of Meditech (Admissions, Billing, etc.) - we can usually ignore it.  If it involves the Lab or BBK modules, we have to do the specific testing recommended for the specific "fix", if available.  Otherwise we have to figure out our own little testing plan.  On top of this, we get the major upgrades every 4-5 years that require the entire module to be retested.  The whole revision retest requires around 200 hours of work and our hospital has not yet paid to sub-contract that work to a 3rd party - darn!!

So - best of luck and I feel for you.

 

[DebbieL]

Our hospital system pays a Cerner subcontract team to validate the big upgrades. I am SO GRATEFUL for this!!!!!. It would be overwhleming for one person to have to go thru everything associated with BB.  We get a huge notebook for our records of what the did. We still have to test a few things. For small upgrades that affect BB, I perform some type of testing with screen shots during testing and also after it goes in.  These are usually not too much. I always test the electronic crossmatch after every validation so I have it on record so I won't get dinged by an inspector.