Amid M&A activity, West Virginia University Health System reduces interface development time by over 50% with Rhapsody

WVUHS is the largest health system in West Virginia and comprises 21 hospitals and five specialty institutes across the state, with additional clinics in Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. It is West Virginia’s largest private employer. 

WVUHS continues to expand and grow the communities it serves through mergers and acquisitions. During this change, clinicians, patients, and staff still expect a seamless experience.  

IT staff must support the associated growth through consolidation, migrations, and by connecting new facilities with system interfaces. They faced several challenges including high expenses like licensing fees, device integrations, and the management of a wide range of applications. Additionally, the demands of continued growth require efficient patient-centered solutions. However, WVUHS’s IT team was undertaking labor-intensive efforts to support large application standardization work, demanding a significant amount of time being spent on integration tasks instead of other higher value work. 

Why Corepoint  

WVUHS wanted to free its IT staff to work on higher value projects and looked for an integration solution that would help alleviate some of the interface programming burden. The team selected Rhapsody’s Corepoint Integration Engine. The Corepoint graphical user interface (GUI) makes many programming activities easier, faster, and more intuitive. Also, embedded functions within the solution help eliminate the need for extra coding and accelerate development and testing. With its low-code capabilities, Corepoint also makes it faster and easier for users to develop interfaces as new facilities and systems are onboarded. 

Implementing a new interface engine is complex because hospitals and health systems perform mission-critical work that cannot be interrupted. The IT team knew they would need to convert and create a large number of FHIR API and HL7 integrations without disruption to clinical teams or patient experience. To support a smooth migration, Rhapsody Professional Services was available to the WVUHS team throughout. 

WVUHS uses Corepoint to handle traditional HL7 V2 interfaces as well as FHIR and API integrations with their EHR, the home-health platform PointClickCare, the revenue-cycle-automation system Olive, and an Alzheimer’s research application from WVU’s Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute (RNI), among others. 

So far, WVUHS has been able to cut interface development time by over 50% and can easily re-use work. 

Corepoint’s templated approach helps the IT team make integration work more repeatable. The team can develop and deploy an interface for one hospital, and then reuse the work to rapidly connect more points of care. For example, the team can enable exchange of admission, discharge, and transfer (ADT) orders and results quickly and reliably with any new facility. This not only reduces error and variance, but it also speeds up onboarding of new facilities. This saves WVUHS time, energy, and money, as they work toward providing the best-possible clinician and patient experience.