RAST 101

The EHR/Provider RAST (“RAVEN Application Sub-Team”) meets monthly on the 3rd Thursday. All medical providers and interested parties are encouraged to attend, especially if submitting item(s) for review.

EHR/Provider RAST submissions are requests for changes to the RAVEN system requested by, and primarily effecting providers. The EHR/Provider RAST Committee meetings allow providers (and others) the opportunity to evaluate and weigh in on the submissions for approval.

All RAST submissions should be endorsed by a direct supervisor before being sent to the committee for review.

If approved by the EHR/Provider RAST, the submissions will then usually need to be submitted the ‘Clinical/Financial RAST Committee’ for approval which meets every two Wednesdays. This offers other discipline representatives (i.e., Nursing, Registration, Scheduling, Finance, IT, CHAP, Village Ops, SRC, Behavioral Health, Diagnostic Services/Lab, Compliance, Coding, Pharmacy, and Performance Improvement) an opportunity to weigh in on the provider requests, ensuring that there are no unintended consequences from the request that may negatively impact other aspects of the organization.

Once a RAST request has been approved, the submitter will be notified via email when the request has been logged into SharePoint and throughout the lifespan of the request as updates are made to the SharePoint ticket. RAST requests with a priority of 3-4 are assigned at RAVEN’s bi-weekly change control meetings. Priority 1 and 2 requests are assigned immediately following the RAST meeting at which it was approved.

RAST requests need to be submitted along with supporting or relevant information, attachments, etc., via our HEAT system (see example below) by the FRIDAY prior to the RAST monthly meeting. Submissions will then be emailed out to all providers on the Monday prior to the monthly meeting for comments. This allows those who are unable to attend the committee meeting a chance to weigh in on the submissions.

There is a distinction between changes in the RAVEN system which need to go through RAST approval processes and a ‘correction’ or ‘fix’. If something in RAVEN is not working properly, needs to be ‘fixed’ or ‘corrected’ (e.g., the Growth Chart is freezing the screen), this should not go to RAST committee. You have two options in this case:

1. If it is an urgent issue impacting patient care, call ext. 6070, option 3 to speak with the RAVEN on-call person.
2. If it is not an urgent issue, it should go to the RAVEN team as a heat ticket.

Whenever possible, it helps to contact the RAVEN team when an error or problem is actually occurring so that they can see your screen. If not possible to report the problem in real-time, please take a screen shot or ‘snip’ of the screen to send later. It helps to provide as much detail as possible to provide context within which to evaluate the problem.