EHR Data Migration Success: 50,000 Patient Appointments Available at Go Live

Boston Software Systems collaborated with a leading regional university hospital health system in a series of EHR migration data initiatives. One of the leading migration priorities was focused on patient appointment data.

The Scale of the Project Was Significant

  • Over 1,000 medical and administrative staff
  • 450 bed facility serving a population of over 390,000 patients
  • Multi-faceted care including surgery, ER / trauma, ambulatory, oncology, dialysis, rehabilitation
  • Healthcare academic teaching hospital
  • Over 50,000 patient appointments to be migrated

The health system realized the importance of appointment data, and wanted to be sure the complete migration to new EHR system would be flawless. The organization had experienced issues with other data migration methods in the past. If the 50,000+ patient appointments were transferred via manual data entry by staff, or outsourced personnel, it would require thousands of hours and thousands of dollars to complete. Data quality would be less than ideal based on human error and volume of appointment records involved.

It was imperative accurate patient appointment data was available on Day 1 of Go Live.

Automation Was Key to a Successful Data Migration

Patient appointment data is ideal for automation, as it's a 100% accurate, complete, and economic way to transfer healthcare information.Automations were designed, built, QA’d, tested and put into production. Goals centered on accuracy, speed and completeness to be certain the migration project was accomplished according to the specific goals and objectives of the organization.

The Process

  • Input files from which to source legacy scheduling data were created along with other setup features to support the EHR data migration exercises
  • The automations precisely accounted for each of the 25+ steps to locate, identify, select, transfer and correctly place within the new scheduling system
  • Multiple computers were used to accelerate processing of data from the input files and precisely place it in the individual patient record profiles in the new system
  • Data errors encountered in the process were partitioned into exception reports for remediation, corrected and reintroduced into the automation workflow so as not to require further manual data entry for it to be placed in the new scheduling system
  • The Boston Software Systems data management console (Active Data Quality / ADQ) validated extractions and normalized data before go-live and provided reports
  • Automation enabled 100% of the data migration to be automated offloading the burden from staff and other stakeholders

The Results

The health system exceeded their EHR migration goals while substantially reducing costs and complexity for the entire health system:

  • All of the approximately 50,000+ patient appointments were in place prior on Day 1 of the EHR Go Live.
  • Manual steps were converted into automated processes; 100% accuracy levels were achieved and human error was eliminated
  • Medical and administrative personnel had immediate, uniform access to patient data through one source
  • The time spent toggling between data sources was eliminated; the financial / technical drag of spending time, money in maintaining two systems was offloaded
  • Organizational productivity was increased; hospital staff were able to focus on their primary roles and not the project
  • The highly repeatable process was developed and is available for future appointment data migrations for additional hospitals and practices in the organization

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