Academic healthcare organization

The customer

For nearly three-quarters of a century, a regional community hospital in South Carolina has been providing advanced healthcare services to its largely rural communities, leading the way to better health. The primary hospital for more than 250,000 people, the healthcare organization has recently undergone significant expansion, standing up new practices and acquiring nearby physician and specialty practices. As it grows, the hospital continues its mission to heal compassionately, improve constantly and transform healthcare for the benefit of its people.

The hospital is also a member of the Epic Community Connect Program, which allows institutions to share utility of Epic’s electronic medical records (EMR) solution.

The challenge

As a result of expansion, the hospital was maintaining nine separate instances of Allscripts, its legacy EMR, which housed over 25 million patient documents for 29 practices. Despite sharing many of the same patients, each practice could only access its own patient data. After consolidating on Epic via Community Connect, the hospital determined its Allscripts installation was obsolete.

The healthcare organization’s goal was to minimize its number of information systems while retaining information fluidity across the institution. Although Epic addressed its EMR requirements, the picture wasn’t complete. The hospital needed to convert all documents, images and metadata from legacy Allscripts databases to one central information repository that was a “one-stop shop” for clinician field access.

The first step was identifying resources to execute the large conversion project. Internal conversion experience and dedicated staff were limited, and sourcing external resources in a rural area was a challenge. Everything considered, the team decided to let Hyland data migration experts take on the heavy lifting.

The solution

The hospital consolidated its legacy databases using Data Migration Conversion Services to minimize risk and end user impact.

An end-to-end conversion with Hyland Global Services

The hospital turned to Hyland Global Services to perform a turnkey, end-to-end, comprehensive conversion of all its legacy Allscripts systems to OnBase. This engagement with Hyland minimized the amount of risk, resources and time needed to make the transition.

Delivering the comprehensive conversion, Hyland took ownership of the extraction, transform and load (ETL). This included project management, data extraction, identification of data sets, sample conversions, testing, import into OnBase and process reporting. While the Hyland team performed these tasks, action required from the hospital IT teams was minimal. The group only assembled for organized touchpoints, weekly check-in calls or when further deliberation was needed.

The Hyland team kept the project on track while documenting details of the entire process, including sample metadata and reconciliation reports.

“We had weekly calls with our primary Hyland contact,” said a senior business systems analyst. “He took charge of documentation, organized meetings, created files with touchpoints and gave us due dates. When things were done, he turned us loose and made sure he was available if we had questions.”

Ensuring success and adoption

One of the hospital’s concerns was how the conversion would impact end users. To prevent costly delays and poor user adoption, Hyland performed comprehensive test conversions to verify the success of conversion routines and content taxonomy before full-scale migration.

To validate the hospital’s success criteria, Hyland delivered reconciliation reports on the success of data transfer and integration. “Hyland did a good job of tracking everything,” said the hospital's manager of support services. “The end-of-project reports that show the patient-level and document-level success of the EMR integration meant we didn’t just have to take their word for it.” The Hyland team had a 99.93% success rate importing the 25 million documents.

With Hyland's OnBase, the hospital has truly transformed into an interconnected, interoperable healthcare organization. Clinicians now have access to the same documents, images and associated metadata whenever they need it. OnBase also delivers this patient data to Epic via the OnBase Patient Window Integration for Epic.

“The Hyland team got us through a very long 18 months, making the conversion as easy as it could possibly be,” said the senior business systems analyst.

With the success of its Allscripts conversion, the healthcare organization plans to partner with Hyland again to continue reducing its number of legacy systems and information silos.

The difference

Better allocation of internal resources

“The project required very little of my attention or effort to keep that ball on track, and that was much appreciated,” said the manager of support services. The support services team retained time to address the needs of end users and stakeholders during the transition, while Hyland executed major project tasks.

Minimizing risk and time

Support services no longer maintained ownership of troubleshooting ETL complications and avoided common errors and delays as a result of Hyland’s conversion methodology and testing procedures.

Validating success

Hyland maintained detailed tracking of the conversion process and produced reports for the support services team to verify success upon completion.