Most platform failures are not technology failures. They are change management failures. We share the 12 week deployment playbook that has shipped 30 projects without a single rollback.
01 / SETUPPre kickoff alignment
Two weeks of disciplined prep saves a quarter of pain later.
Before kickoff, three things must be true. The clinical team has to know what is coming. The coding team has to feel like partners. The CFO has to own the success metric. If any of the three is missing, push the kickoff.
02 / PILOTThe pilot phase
Weeks 1 to 4.
03 / SCALEScaling across specialties
Weeks 5 to 8.
The mistake most teams make is moving too slow on scale. Once the pilot proves out, the next two specialties should move on a 2 week cadence. Slow scale erodes trust and momentum.
04 / RUNSteady state operations
Weeks 9 onward.
Daily QA
A senior coder reviews 50 random charts
Weekly metrics
Accuracy, TAT, denial pattern, coder override rate
Quarterly tuning
Retrain on overrides and payer rule changes
05 / RULESFive rules we never break
No exceptions.
- Always run a 4 week shadow before cutting live
- Always include the senior coder in the governance loop
- Always show physicians the metric before the rollout
- Always run quarterly blind audits on accuracy
- Never let the AI write to the EHR without human review on inpatient
Implementation is not a tooling project, it is a change management project. The playbook above has shipped 30 projects without a rollback. Most of the work happens in the first three weeks. Most of the value compounds for years after.