Your organization has made the decision to replace its electronic health record (EHR). Perhaps it’s outdated. Or you’re going through merger and acquisition activity. Maybe customer or technical service doesn’t meet your needs. Or you’ve identified shortcomings in the existing EHR and discovered a new system offers improved workflows that will help improve efficiencies, patient safety, or the clinician experience. Whatever the reason, with the rate that technology is evolving, modernizing to the latest and greatest is almost always a good decision, but not one made lightly.
If you’re a CIO or vice president of IT, migrating to a new EHR causes sleepless nights. The migration process takes months if not years to complete, and you have to work across IT, clinical, and administrative teams. Among many things to consider are financial risk, migration timelines, possible interruptions to patient care, and how to keep clinicians happy during the migration, just to name a few.
Upgrading your integration solution alongside this EHR migration makes sense, whether you’re in the decision-making phase or in the preliminary stages of migration. If you’re investing human and financial capital in the latest and greatest EHR, there are four reasons to go all in and do the same with your integration solution as well.
Maintaining EHR migration timelines and optimizing IT efficiency
Everyone working in healthcare understands that time is a commodity increasingly in short supply. When considering an EHR upgrade, efficiency is key to a successful migration, which makes ease of integration an essential element for a smooth transition.
The migration timeline is your initial focus with the goal of limiting downtime as much as possible. A state-of-the-art integration solution helps simplify or automate many of these processes and minimizes the need for manual touchpoints and transfer of data. Adhering to the timeline helps alleviate some of the pressure on everyone involved in the project.
It’s common knowledge across healthcare that everyone is doing more with less. An EHR migration pulls resources from your teams that are already stretched thin. Through process improvement and better automation, your organization can adhere to the timeline with the same or fewer IT personnel involved.
As your healthcare delivery organization changes to a new EHR, you face a daunting challenge: rebuilding interfaces. The average hospital likely doesn’t know how many interfaces it has and will underestimate how many more it will require in the future. A modernized integration solution allows you to build interfaces quicker, offers more flexibility with better UI, and enables analysts as well as engineers to build interfaces.
Leveraging a modern integration solution’s capabilities reduces the risks and time necessary to complete the cutover phase. It can also minimize data loss and maintain data integrity.
Protecting your EHR investment
Healthcare IT evolves at an incredible pace. With the move toward open ecosystems, your healthcare organization isn’t limited to standard capabilities built into the EHR, even the new one you’re migrating to. You can integrate with other powerful third-party apps to bring your patients and clinicians closer together.
According to Gartner1, “By 2026, 20% of healthcare providers will have shifted away from patient portals tethered to the electronic health record (EHR) in favor of digital front door solutions for their primary method of digital patient engagement.” Adoption of digital health innovation enables organizations to use new creative ways to center care around patient needs for a more successful health journey.
Leveling up your integration solution helps improve adaptability and scalability. Think of it like this: If you upgraded to 5-gig home internet but kept the same eight-year-old Wi-Fi, you wouldn’t achieve optimal performance. And as your family adds and upgrades new devices, your Wi-Fi may not communicate well.
The same is true for integration. Upgrading your integration package helps protect your investment and futureproof your EHR. It can grow as you grow and allows you to modify your EHR with new apps, new ways to work, new capabilities, and new interfaces.
You’ll build a strong foundation for the EHR migration and beyond.
Enhancing the experience for patients, clinical and non-clinical staff
Not everyone enjoys change and it can elevate the stress level, not only of your IT team, but clinical and non-clinical employees as well. During all phases of your EHR migration, it’s essential that workflows function properly to ensure that everything goes smoothly.
Chances are, your IT staff is already overburdened, and a migration draws focus away from their day-to-day responsibilities. Manual migration requires a lot of time and resources. This can cause hiccups that create headaches associated with disruption in workflows at best; and at worst can be detrimental to patient safety, satisfaction, and outcomes.
By automating migration processes, a modern integration solution minimizes the need to redirect IT resources. When everything runs smoothly, it eases staff concerns about change, and improves IT, clinical, and administrative satisfaction, during the migration and after. Most importantly, a modern integration solution can ensure that your patients get the care they need, when they need it.
Addressing the volume of data, holistically
Like many healthcare systems, you may face a common challenge: data silos. Your organization may even have silos within silos. Consider the number of clinical specialties, satellite locations, and the myriad non-clinical departments.
But that’s just the tip of the data iceberg.
According to HealthTech Magazine, the average hospital produces roughly 50 petabytes of data annually, which is more than twice the amount of data housed in the Library of Congress in the U.S. That amounts to 137 terabytes per day. The amount of data generated in healthcare has been increasing at a rate of 47 percent per year.
How is that possible? In addition to the ubiquitous use of EHRs, factor in the increasing number of medical devices, an explosion of genetic testing, and patient-generated health data (think wearables), and you’ll have an idea of how healthcare generates the sheer volume of data it does.
Over the past decade, the entire industry has focused on interoperability to enhance connectivity, communication, and collaboration to improve clinical and operational outcomes. To be more efficient, healthcare systems must eliminate silos and fragmented data and move to a single source of information. With the right integration foundation, you’re able to take a more holistic view of patient data and connect to a single system that gives you better visibility, inventory, and efficiency. By consolidating data from various sources, modern integration solutions enable your healthcare organization to gain valuable insights to take on population health management, identify trends, and optimize resource allocation.
More than 1,700 healthcare systems in 31 countries trust Rhapsody
We understand the challenges health systems face when they’re changing EHRs. Concerns about the financial risk. Avoiding interruptions to patient care. The fear clinicians and staff have when making a change of this magnitude. The possibility of introducing security vulnerabilities. And the ramifications of unexpected downtime.
We’ll meet you where you are, while offering you the flexibility to determine whether you want to take on the integration with your team or use Rhapsody. In the future, your team will be able to build interfaces faster, scale quicker, and handle maintenance easier.
Rhapsody has earned the Best in KLAS® Integration Engine award since 2009, the latest in 2024. If you’re considering changing your EHR, or have recently completed the process, we can help you get the most from your investment with a new integration solution.
For more information, check out these resources:
- Gartner, “Predicts 2023: Changing How Healthcare Provider Services and Operations Are Delivered”, Barry Runyon, Sharon Hakkennes, Gregg Pessin, 05 December 2022
