Data from six acquired EHRs consolidated into a single, accessible repository and made part of the longitudinal patient record
Harrison Memorial Hospital (HMH), a provider of health and care services in Kentucky, recently completed a significant project to consolidate patient data from six acquired primary physician practices by implementing BridgeHead Software’s Independent Clinical Archive (ICA), HealthStore™.
As part of its ambitious plans to expand its facility to a regional medical center, HMH not only made the decision to upgrade its primary MEDITECH EHR to version 6.15, it also acquired six regional physician practices. As part of those acquisitions, HMH also inherited six independent eClinicalWorks EHRs, each containing valuable, current and historic clinical information.
HMH’s goal was to make all of the data from these systems available to clinicians and support staff as part of an enterprise patient record, through its primary Electronic Health Record (EHR), allowing it to standardize on the MEDITECH platform across the organization. The challenge was how to extract the data from the six eClinicalWorks databases and make it available as part of the longitudinal patient record easily accessible to clinicians and support staff through its MEDITECH EHR.
Creating one centralized clinical repository for all patient information
HMH had been a longstanding customer of BridgeHead Software, utilizing its backup and recovery solutions to protect the hospital’s primary healthcare applications. However, after seeing a demonstration at MUSE International 2017 in Dallas, Texas, HMH was convinced that HealthStore would provide the solution it was looking for: namely, a centralized clinical repository to house data that was extracted, migrated and indexed from its inherited EHRs. The project was completed within six months and resulted in a single, enterprise-wide patient record offering a complete 360-degree view of vital patient information, as well as allowing HMH to retire the six inherited eClinicalWorks systems saving significant time, resources and money.
David Asher, Physician Practice Support Manager, at Harrison Memorial Hospital explains: “Having just updated our current MEDITECH system, we were keen to consolidate the patient information from our six inherited eClinicalWorks systems and integrate it into our primary EHR. We have a responsibility to ensure the efficient and safe delivery of care to patients and part of that is giving our physicians access to a complete record containing both current and historic data from across our health system.”
Overcoming conflicting and duplicate patient IDs
The specialists at BridgeHead intelligently extracted, migrated and indexed 1.2 million documents from the existing eClinicalWorks databases in order to create a complete patient record. But, before the data could be fully ingested, BridgeHead worked with HMH to create rules to reconcile and resolve data issues, primarily where there were conflicting and duplicate patient IDs, by utilizing the patient database within HealthStore. Not only did this eliminate the laborious and time-consuming process of manually translating the records into the hospital’s EHR, it guaranteed that the extracted data corresponded with the correct patients.
At the end of the process, 100% of the data was positively reconciled into HealthStore and made easily available ‘in patient context’ through the newly upgraded MEDITECH 6.15 environment.
Martha Sullivan, CIO at Harrison Memorial Hospital continues: “Running duplicate applications across our new regional care center was never an option for us – it’s costly, inefficient, resource intensive – and, had we not faced the issue head on, the situation would have grown more complicated over time. Yet, the consolidation of multiple systems was not something we took on lightly.
“However, after working with BridgeHead to retire the eClinicalWorks applications, we no longer have to worry about where this patient information resides – it’s housed in a central repository out of direct ownership of the originating application. What this means for us, as we continue to expand and potentially acquire other practices, is that we don’t have to be concerned with how we handle inherited systems and their data. HealthStore is now in place to ingest any patient or administrative information we need that will best serve our physicians and patients: from consultation to diagnosis and treatment; inpatient or outpatient services.”
Jim Beagle, President and CEO of BridgeHead Software comments: “Tackling duplicate and legacy systems, and the data silos they create, is a vital part of the digital transformation taking place in healthcare today. By consolidating inherited data, the physicians at HMH are now able to easily access the full patient history, all available through their primary EHR, and reap the benefits of an improved clinical workflow. This ultimately enables the hospital to focus on its mission of providing high-quality health and care services to residents in Harrison County and the wider community.”
