The following is a guest article by Justin Campbell, Vice President, Strategy, at Galen Healthcare Solutions.
When you go-live with MEDITECH Expanse, you will need to give serious thought to how you are going to ensure immediate clinical continuity and maximum usability. You will want to achieve data migration of a configurable and clean subset of data regardless of the vendor. You will also want to coordinate legacy system data archiving. Both of these are necessary for legal hold, secondary clinical continuity (through single sign-on from Expanse), and cost savings at legacy system retirement.
As hospitals and health systems adopt Expanse, they will need to determine the optimal data retention and access strategy which will best serve clinical, IT, administrative, financial, and legal requirements.
Determining which data from systems can be migrated will require a thorough understanding of all the options offered by MEDITECH and other third-party vendors. In addition, once a data migration strategy is decided upon, thought should be devoted to governance, gaining feedback from and educating stakeholders about the data migration. Keep in mind that migrations support the MPI, acute, and ambulatory clinical and financial data, which means you must determine the value of populating Expanse with data and how that data improves the continuity of care for providers while reducing the burden of data re-entry from clinical staff.
When selecting the discrete data you want migrated, it’s best to start with the basics, such as patient demographics and information: vitals, problem lists, medications, allergies, immunizations, medical history, and family history. This data must also include lab, pathology, radiology, and imaging results, as well as provider notes. Some organizations also find value in migrating ancillary data such as the patient’s primary care physician, preferred pharmacy, and insurance information. Formation of a Physician Advisory Council can also help ensure proper data governance.
Some of the considerations for planning, scoping and strategy include:
- Determining how will legacy patient data be accessed.
- Identifying what data will not move to the new HIS system.
- Having confidence that processes are fine-tuned to ensure operation in the event of system downtime.
- Assuring that business offices can continue collecting revenue.
- Confirming that the reporting software will allow data to be combined from multiple systems.
- Certifying that there are enough resources to cover extended training and ongoing maintenance.
- Figuring how much it will cost each month in maintenance for the legacy system.
- Confirming how long the legacy system will need to be licensed before pursuing decommissioning.
- Realizing how downstream systems will be affected by new patient identifiers.
Timing the data migration go-live to occur at the same time as the application go-live will “light-up” Expanse and facilitate continuing of care with access to patient charts populated with demographics, medications, and other clinical elements. In addition, data migration can deliver significant gains in user productivity and satisfaction. The key is getting access to readily available discrete data and all the necessary information required to treat the patient as easily as possible.
Want to learn more about providing immediate clinical continuity and maximizing usability at MEDITECH Expanse go-live? Download the full whitepaper, Switching to MEDITECH EXPANSE – Preserving Data at the Point of Care, which covers the many data migration & archiving considerations to evaluate when navigating the switch to MEDITECH Expanse.
About Justin Campbell
Justin is Vice President, Strategy, at Galen Healthcare Solutions. He is responsible for market intelligence, segmentation, business and market development and competitive strategy. Justin has been consulting in Health IT for over 12 years, guiding clients in the implementation, integration and optimization of clinical systems. He has been on the front lines of system replacement and data migration, and is passionate about advancing interoperability in healthcare and harnessing analytical insights to realize improvements in patient care. Justin can be found on Twitter at @TJustinCampbell and LinkedIn.
About Galen Healthcare Solutions
Galen Healthcare Solutions is an award-winning, KLAS-ranked healthcare IT technical and professional services and solutions company providing high-skilled, cross-platform expertise and proud sponsor of the MEDITECH Expanse Migration Series. For over a decade, Galen has partnered with specialty practices, hospitals, health information exchanges, health systems and integrated delivery networks to provide data conversion and archival solutions. Galen has completed more than 500 successful data conversion & archiving projects and has experience with over 100 unique systems. Galen’s data migration team was named 2020 KLAS Category Leader for HIT Implementation Leadership (Small) and recognized in KLAS’ 2020 Technical Services report for breadth, versatility, experience, and balancing price and performance. Galen’s archiving solution, VitalCenter Online, was recognized by KLAS in their inaugural report, Legacy Data Archiving 2019 A First Look at a Changing Market, for the accuracy and accessibility of its data and for its industry-leading commitment to customer experience. For more information, visit www.galenhealthcare.com. Connect with us on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
