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Tag: EHR Migration

How to leverage your integration engine for seamless EHR Migration and reduce upgrade costs?

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Health System Integration

In the complex landscape of Electronic Health Record (EHR) migration, having a robust integration engine managed by an experienced integration team can be a game-changer for health systems. Integration engines like Cloverleaf, CorePoint, InterSystems, Mirth, Rhapsody, Jaguar, Qvera, and others play a pivotal role in streamlining data flows and connectivity. Here’s why taking advantage of these engines can significantly ease the challenges associated with transitioning to a new EHR and also reduce costs associated with other vendor contract updates.

1. Streamlined Connectivity Timelines:

  • Having an integration engine already connected to downstream systems means a head start in the migration process. For instance, if your current EHR is sending Admission, Discharge, Transfer (ADT) messages and Orders to a Cardiology system, the workflow with the future EHR will likely perform the similar functions. This continuity significantly reduces the time spent on establishing new connections, as the connections between integration engine and the downstream system are already in place.

2. Cost-Efficiency and Resource Optimization:

  • Integrating a new EHR is a resource-intensive process. Utilizing an existing integration engine not only saves time but also contributes to cost-efficiency. The ability to repurpose established connections minimizes the need for additional infrastructure setup, ultimately optimizing resources. Depending on the workflows, timelines, etc. it may not be necessary for the downstream system to create any new interfaces, since the engine could be leveraged to send test messages from the new EHR test environment and also the existing EHR test environment. This could help significantly reduce contract update costs with the downstream system vendors.

3. Consistency in Data Routing:

  • When migrating EHRs, one of the challenges is rewriting existing interfaces. However, with an integration engine, you have the advantage of maintaining consistency in data routing. For example, even though the new EHR might require testing interfaces, your integration team can leverage the existing connections in the engine. This means that ADTs and Orders from the new EHR’s test environment can be seamlessly routed within the engine, eliminating the need for establishing new VPN tunnels or ports.

4. Optimizing Interface Reuse:

  • Many EHR vendors may create new interfaces to accommodate the testing phase of the new system. However, having an integration engine allows for intelligent interface reuse. The engine allows your integration team to review existing interface modifications, mapping etc. and provides a head start for interfacing with the downstream system. Existing interfaces could be cloned and modified as needed based on the messages from the new EHR.

5. Flexibility in Testing Scenarios:

  • The versatility of integration engines enables your team to adapt to various testing scenarios. Whether the new EHR necessitates specific configurations or adjustments, the integration engine provides the flexibility to handle diverse requirements without compromising on connectivity. Combining test automation with the engine can help clinical and IT teams test all possible scenarios without needing to take up valuable time from clinical resources.

Conclusion:

In the intricate landscape of EHR migration, the role of integration engines cannot be overstated. By leveraging the connectivity already established through these engines, health systems can navigate the migration process with greater efficiency, reduced timelines, and minimized disruptions. As technology evolves, integration engines stand as invaluable assets, ensuring seamless transitions and continuity in healthcare data management.

For over 15 years Tido Inc. has been partnering with health systems for EHR migrations and integration management. If you have any questions or need assistance with your health system’s ehr conversion, contact us today. We are here to support you in navigating the challenges of EMR migration and ensuring a smooth transition for your organization.

Healthcare technology in 2023 and beyond!

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Healthcare 2023

We’re not making definitive predictions here, but the rapid changes seen in healthcare have been remarkable these past years, and going into 2023 we can be certain there will be new challenges and opportunities. We do expect some themes to continue into 2023 and beyond.

Challenging margins for health systems and independent practices. As reimbursements to health care organizations has languished, the importance of ensuring the maximum returns on existing investments will be key. Over the past decade there have been massive investments in new systems and networks, every part of healthcare operations has been connected to a tech-enabled system. To realize the gains promised these networks need to be functional and reliable. Are your systems working like they’re supposed to? Or does the staff have the impression that ‘nothing works like it supposed to!’ Disconnected applications or unforeseen application issues can cause significant delays, frustrate staff, and waste valuable time. Applications and Integration monitoring can ensure those technology investments are pulling their weight and maximizing return, supporting clinical staff and powering seamless operations.

Healthcare worker burnout and moral injury are likely to be concerns into 2023 and beyond. Network reliability can be a source of frustration for clinicians, reliable systems are one component of providing a high quality experience, interfaces and tools that provide a better working environment will certainly be another. The proliferation of apps and tools to enhance user experience for both patient and clinician will likely continue, albeit at a slower rate than prior years. Having the best possible tools and apps can be a key strategy to keeping employees engaged and patient focused, whether it is a third party app or custom mobile and web applications, new solutions will continue to be front and center.

Over the past few years we have seen a massive shift in how healthcare is delivered, from a largely in-person environment toward more telehealth and virtual solutions than ever before. While there has been slowing in the market for many of these independent services, telehealth will continue to be a necessity for any health service moving forward. In a distributed clinical environment current systems may not be enough to have a fully functional clinic. EHRs optimized for in-person care may not work with distributed clinical staff, will other solutions be utilized? What portions of intake can be automated, how will those answers be populated into the EHR and get to right clinician at the right time? Is the right patient information populating over, medication history, allergies, radiology reports, the list can be daunting. If a new system is being implement over existing infrastructure ensuring adequate testing and integration will be key to enabling high quality patient care. Moving to a new EHR can pose even more challenges, migrating data is complex and requires a high degree of certainty. Managing these data sharing challenges will continue to be a priority as care becomes more distributed beyond a single physical site.

Maybe we’ll offer one prediction for 2023… Tido Inc. will be here and continue partnering with health systems and practices to face a challenging and changing technology landscape! Reach out today, we’re happy to work with you to face the healthcare challenges in this year, and beyond.

Healthcare M&A… Another present for the holidays?

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Healthcare Mergers and Acquisition

HLTH 2022 has come and gone and the technologies out there promise great things from healthcare in the future, but these technologies take time to mature and prove there efficacy. While there is hope for the future, the specter of decreased valuations and funding looms over an industry poised for change. There is one thing has been clear these past few months, consolidation is continuing, the holiday sales season is in full swing for the healthcare industry. While a large merger, or smaller consolidation may be an early holiday present for executives and investors, it creates challenges and headaches for IT teams and clinical staff. Tylenol certainly won’t help cure these woes.

Migrating different EHR systems is probably the largest hurdle, but there are also systems for pharmacy and radiology that can create a nightmare for IT teams that are already taxed maintaining existing systems. The additional burden can be overwhelming and cause systems to grind to a halt.

For clinical staff focused on seeing patients and taking care of their needs, the disruption to smooth operations can likewise be overwhelming. Did all the information transfer over? Has a patient’s medication allergy been missed? Has an existing medication been missed that could interact with a new one? These are concerns that need to addressed to put the clinical staff’s mind at ease and ensure that they can provide the best possible care to the patient’s.

Beyond patient safety concerns, there are also productivity concerns. Ineffective integration can lead to slowdowns in clinics, creating long wait times and dissatisfaction among staff and the patients who are waiting to be seen. Missing radiology reports, delays in diagnostic testing, lab results not showing, and prescriptions not getting routed properly are just some of the problems that can arise without proper integration and testing of systems.

Clinical staff are not IT experts and likely have little idea of what happens behind the scenes to ensure the smooth flow of information and data that enable safe and effective care. The clinical teams just want systems that work. When systems fail clinical staff safety can be compromised, staff frustration will grow as they resort to work-arounds. Most clinical staff have experienced this when EHRs and other systems were first rolled out, they are often jaded by these experiences that were disruptive and disconnected.

How do you ensure that transition to a new EHR will populate the data where it is expected? Will there be conflicting patient information? Will the images be migrated over to the right patient? Will prescriptions be sent to the pharmacy?

There is no end to the questions from clinicians about how it will work and what the experience will be after. How prepared are the teams behind the scenes to enable this migration? Do IT teams have the experience necessary to carry out this operation in an efficient and effective manner, after all, it’s not something they do every day.

There are many stresses associated with mergers and consolidation, IT systems should not be one of them. Tido Inc. can help handle these questions and work with IT teams to enable efficient and effective systems integration and migration. Check out Tido’s integration and migration packages.

Winter is coming…

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Birds migrate south for better climates.  Is it time to start re-evaluating your EHR climate?

Well known among clinicians are the challenges with many EHR systems, troubling user interfaces, difficulty navigating screens, and the number of mouse clicks required for even the most mundane tasks. As different EHR systems improve and provide more user-friendly interfaces, the challenges associated with choosing the best system for patient care should not be insurmountable.

Staff have finally gotten used to the existing system, so why change? Just because the current system is what everyone is used to, does not necessarily mean it is the best choice.

Health systems and physician practices have more choices than ever for EHR systems. Cloud based systems allow great flexibility and decreased infrastructure costs, traditional licensed software systems can offer more customized security and storage options. Practices may outgrow one EHR and have a need to move on to a new one, maybe the price has become prohibitive, maybe the nature of the practice itself has changed. The reasons for changing the EHR can be numerous.

Physicians, nurses, techs, and whole practices have likely spent countless hours customizing interfaces, connecting numerous devices and apps, and reducing their reliance on fax machines. Choosing a new EHR, for whatever reason, should not be a step backwards.

How do you choose a new EHR to begin with?

How do you handle the data migration?

What about all the existing patient data?

What about all the clinical workflows?

Where do you even start?!

Larger health systems may have an army of IT specialists at their disposal to help answer these questions, but even for large systems a migration of this size is a challenge. Are there the right people in place to begin with? What does the current infrastructure look like, can it even support a new system? For smaller hospitals or independent practices all these questions can seem overwhelming.

In 2016 the ONC published a guide to selecting EHR vendors, while published six years ago, the information is still relevant. For clinical and patient care staff one of the most important questions to be answered is whether or not the patient’s information will be present on day one. All patient data and information should be readily available to provide the continuity of care that everyone expects. All equipment used to enable patient care should be connected and functioning from day one.

Anyone who has been through systems and EHR implementations in healthcare is likely aware of the challenges and pain points that can occur. No matter how much training and testing has been completed, on day one, there will be questions and something will be missed. Clinical staff want systems that just work, and if something is broken, they want it fixed quickly so they can focus on their patients.

If you’ve experienced the challenge of implementing an EHR system, the thought of migrating to a new one might give you nightmares. Don’t let data migration, testing, and support be a barrier to implementing the best system for clinical staff and patients. Tido Inc. can help answer many of these questions with advisory services and assist with EHR migration and post go-live support.

Berkshire Health Systems upgrades EHR to Meditech Expanse

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Berkshire Health System
On February 1, 2020, Berkshire Health Systems went live with a new Electronic Health Record system: Meditech Expanse. Berkshire Health System migrated from Meditech Client/Server to Meditech Expanse.
 
The upgrade was the culmination of a multifaceted project planned by the hospital and its’ implementation partners. Santa Rosa Consulting, Inc. was selected to lead the Berkshire Health Systems MEDITECH Expanse system implementation. “An implementation of this magnitude only occurs once every couple of decades for providers like Berkshire. We are thrilled to play an important part in its success,” said Mark Scruggs, executive vice president  at Santa Rosa. “Our vendor-neutral EHR expertise allowed us to present a number of viable options for Berkshire to select from, to meet their defined objectives. Ultimately, by deciding to upgrade to MEDITECH’s next generation platform, Expanse, the organization will be well positioned to meet the critical healthcare demands of lowering costs while improving the health of their patient population.”
 
Tido Inc. worked closely with their partner Santa Rosa Consulting, Inc. to lead the integration project for Berkshire Meditech Expanse migration. After doing an initial assessment of the integration environment, Tido’s team worked with the BHS Information Technology team to develop an integration plan tailored for Berkshire migration to Meditech Expanse. The detailed plan included suggested timeframes, resource allocations required, and responsibilities typically associated with successful implementation. One of the first steps our team did was to ensure that there was a stable integration framework in place by completing the upgrade of the Rhapsody integration engine; which would pave the way for thorough testing of all interfaces for Expanse migration.
 
Our team worked closely with Berkshire IT and departments on interface testing, validation, and user acceptance testing. We prepared a very clear go-live plan for all interfaces, and check-off list to ensure successful switch over for all interfaces. Tido’s team also prepared testing, validation, and management plan for all physician offices integrating with Berkshire Health System. According to Rachel, IT Manager, at Berkshire Health Systems: “Santa Rosa / Tido’s integration team were very thorough in their planning and implementation of interfaces for our Meditech Expanse Go Live. We had a very successful Expanse go live and we really appreciate their partnership.”
 
Our teams continue to work with Berkshire Health System to enhance physician office integration management and ways to extend EHR in the future with interoperability in the cloud with FHIR for Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, Mobile Apps, and provide better security for integration with external partners.
 
About Tido Inc.:
For more than a decade we have been supporting healthcare providers with technology integrations, cloud services, hospital intranets-websites, and custom mobile app development. TIDO inc. started back in 2007, since then we have partnered with a number of health providers in the US and Canada. Our business is healthcare, and we work hard to ensure that we understand the unique needs of healthcare organizations and provide technology solutions and services to meet those needs.
We will continue to invest and enhance our suite of products and services to allow our health partners to provide the best patient care in their communities.
For more information, visit https://www.tidoinc.com or call (888) 778-3021.
 
About Santa Rosa Consulting:
Santa Rosa Consulting provides management advisory and technical consulting services across the spectrum of vendor and IT products and systems. We empower better healthcare by designing, creating, staffing and sustaining IT solutions that deliver quantified value. Founded in 2008, Santa Rosa Consulting is managed by industry veterans with an average of 20 years of healthcare information technology experience. Santa Rosa is recognized for delivering world-class services and solutions and has received Modern Healthcare’s Best Places to Work in Healthcare award multiple years in a row. For more information, visit santarosaconsulting.com or call (866) 944-4772.
 
About Berkshire Health Systems:
Berkshire Health Systems is the region’s leading provider of comprehensive healthcare services. With award-winning programs, nationally-recognized physicians, world-class technology and a sincere commitment to the community, BHS is delivering the kind of advanced healthcare most commonly found in large metropolitan centers. For more information, visit www.berkshirehealthsystems.org