How to avoid an Epic fail with incomplete nova release notes

Are you an Epic Clarity change manager responsible for verifying, planning and preparing your healthcare organization for new release upgrades?   Ever run into situations where the distributed Nova Release Notes were incomplete or inaccurate, resulting in a release going live with some unexpected issues you had not been prepared for?

I finditez to avoid Epic release failures
Keep calm and finditez to fix this

To be fair, the Epic software is very complex and has a large team working hard to continually enhance their offering.   It is not uncommon with delivery deadlines and last minute changes within a release that some updates don’t make it all the way back into the documentation that is distributed, despite all the best intentions and attention to detail.

Remember beaker from the muppets?   He had that expression and expectation that every experiment ( Epic release ) would have some pain.   It is not IF, but WHEN the pain would come.  Just look at that hair and those eyes clearly expressing the stress and fear.   From experience, it was inevitable that it would likely happen, again.

FinditEZ to carry on
keep calm and trust @finditez to carry on!

But it doesn’t have to be that way.  You don’t need your client group cringing everytime an Epic release change is implemented.   They can, in fact, experience the positive emotion of “hey, that was seamless” … and these new features are fantastic!

It goes beyond just the Epic release and what the vendor can alert you to.  What about all of your own custom programs, interfaces and reports built on top of the Epic SQL Server or Oracle data warehouse?  You need a way to search not only the vendor code within the release, but also where and how changes to their underlying data model may affect your customized reports and programs.

Healthcare organizations like Upstate Univerisity, Aspirus, Stony Book Medicine, and Honor Health rely on our change impact analysis software to show them just that.  How to avoid an Epic release failure as described our FinditEZ productivity software users:

  • With each Epic upgrade we are able to extract something called a compass comparison.  This is a generated file that lists all database related changes such as deprecated tables, deprecated columns and data type changes, etc.  We then import the search string into finditez and search the necessary locations.  The locations we search may contain Epic supplied reports, custom reports and/or ETL programs.  The automatically generated change impact lists are then exported to Excel or MS Project as tasks and distributed to our developers to continue processing.
  • Also, when an upgrade occurs we are given a new reporting content which contains all our reports, modified or not.  Since we’ve found that there seems to be missing Nova Notes for some report changes, we use the FinditEZ database schema and file compare wizard to compare the new release data model, SQL code and reporting content to the production system.  This allows us to verify the release notes with complete accuracy, as well as extend the analysis to our own custom code stack.
  • Aside from Epic upgrade, we also modify our own data warehouse, which we then have to search to find what reports, etc would be impacted by the changes made.  Find it EZ currently allows searching of our Oracle databases, SQL Server databases, Crystal Reports, SQR, and C#, HTML and SAP Business Objects report schedules and documents.

Take control of your Epic releases with FinditEZ, get your free trial today .   Software change made simple.

About the author

Ken Gnazdowsky holds a Bachelor of (Computing) Science degree from Simon Fraser University. A recipient of the Governor General of Canada bronze medallion, he began his post-secondary education at Brandon University on an academic scholarship, Ken has worked in the software development industry for over 30 years. Ken is co-founder and President of Find it EZ Software Corp., creators of the Microsoft award-winning products, Code Search Pro and Dev Surge 365.

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