Teamwork And Proven Processes Key To Baptist Health Successful Conversion

baptist-health-conversion

With seven hospitals and likely more to come, Baptist Health’s information system faced the daunting challenge of maintaining, operating, and connecting numerous legacy systems. By closely working together, Baptist Health and Creative Information Technology, Inc. strategically employed our Data Retention and Interoperability (DRIS) to achieve a single data source for patient history data (from their legacy systems – including, most recent, Allscripts TouchWorks), simplify their IT infrastructure, and reduce costs. Here’s how:

Background and Objectives

Looking to create a single source of data, simplify their IT environment, and reduce costs, Baptist Health (Jacksonville, FL) turned to CITI and our DRIS (Data Retention and Interoperability Solution) as their archival solution for the clinical and patient accounting applications they were decommissioning.

Before migrating systems into DRIS, Baptist Health experienced the following:

  • Inefficient workflows to navigate multiple systems for the Release of Information
  • High cost of maintaining multiple servers, license/maintenance agreements, and other costs
  • Difficulty accessing patient history data by clinicians treating patients

Approach and Solution

On August 1st, 2022, this U.S.News & World Report Hospital (ranked in the top 5% of hospitals in Florida) completed a significant step in their multi-phased project by successfully going live with Epic. This significant milestone was the result of teamwork. Faced with challenges including the transitioning of a key member of the team (our ETL expert) to a new job and a potential three-week delay, CITI’s team of experts combined our CMM-ML 3 certified processes and a round-the-clock approach to get the job done right and on time.

In this effort, our TechOps and ETL team quickly put together a plan to improve the speed at which the data loads, without impacting the current use of DRIS. The PM and the client prioritized the order of loading the data and presenting it to clinicians in time for their Go Live. And, to promote the effective use of DRIS, our team created custom job aides relating to the specific implementation project and user groups.

As a result of teamwork and user focus, Baptist Health successfully went live, and the number of users grew quickly from several hundred to over 2 thousand users with further growth expected with the migration of their legacy hospital system (Cerner) in 2023 Q2.

Initially, Baptist Health began using DRIS when they consolidated several ambulatory systems into TouchWorks and hospital systems into Cerner. Phase 1 included 6 systems, including eCW, 3 instances of GE Centricity, NextGen, and Medinformatix. In this initial phase, Baptist Health also migrated two instances of Allscripts Professional and TherAssist.

Outcomes

In terms of immediate benefits, Baptist Health enjoys the following:

  • Improved data availability – providing central access to complete patient history (beyond just the limited set of conversion data) – leading to better continuity for patients on long-term care plans
  • Simpler more cost-effective IT infrastructure – reducing the number of systems they need to maintain while eliminating maintenance and service fees
  • Simpler compliance – giving their HIM team one location to release historical records
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