Ordinarily, snagging a contract to help with an Epic install is a prized opportunity. Anyone involved with this kind of project makes very good money, and the experience burnishes their resume too.
In this case, though, a group of nurse contractors says that the assignment was a nightmare. After being recruited and traveling across the US to work, they say, they were treated horribly by the contractor overseeing the Mayo Clinic’s go-live of its Epic EMR.
According to a recent news story, the Clinic hired a team of seven nurses to help with the final stages of the rollout. The nurses, all of whom were familiar with Epic, were recruited by Mayo vendor the HCI Group. One nurse, Angela Coffaro, was offered $15,000 for her work. However, she found the way she was treated to be so offensive that she quit after only days on the job. Working conditions were “horrendous,” she told the reporter.
Nurse.org reported that another nurse said the contract nurses were verbally abused, intimidated, and even threatened that they would lose their jobs on an “hourly” basis. They also noted being assigned to positions well outside the skill set. For example, Coffaro said, she was sent to the outpatient eye clinic instead of the OR, and an OR nurse to radiology.
What’s more, the HCI Group executives apparently treated the nurses brutally during training sessions. According to some, they were not permitted to leave the training room even to use the restroom during 6 to 8-hour orientation sessions.
Adding insult to injury, the contractor allegedly failed to provide adequate housing. For example, Nurse.org tells the story of Cleveland-based nurse practitioner Kumbi Madiye, who arrived at 9 AM the day before her training was scheduled to begin and found only chaos. Madiye told the publication that she waited 14 hours without a room, only to find out at 11 PM that her assigned room was an hour and a half away.
The story stresses that while the nurses said they were astonished by HCI Group’s attitude and performance, they had no problem with the way they were treated by Mayo Clinic personnel.
That being said, if even half of the allegations are true, Mayo would certainly bear some responsibility for failing to supervise their vendor adequately. Also, my instinct is that one or more of the nurses must have told Mayo what was going on and if the Clinic’s leaders did anything about the problem the nurses never mentioned it.
I’m also very surprised any vendor might have abused IT-savvy nurses with precious Epic experience. As sprawling as the health IT world is, word gets around, and I doubt anyone can afford to alienate a bunch of Epic experts.
