Marion General Hospital

Marion General Hospital (MGH) is a provider of high-quality medical services in rural Grant County, Indiana. For nearly 120 years, the organization has gone above and beyond to make their community happier and healthier. This is reflected in the fact that MGH holds ‘Magnet designation for excellence in nursing services’ from the American Nurses Credential Center’s (ANCC) Magnet Recognition Program. This recognition is one of the highest that a hospital can achieve and places MGH in a very select group of healthcare organizations, not only in Indiana, but nationwide. The organization has also received the CHIME HealthCare’s Most Wired award several times, highlighting their position in the top 10% of technologically advanced hospitals in the state.

MGH has been a Meditech client since 2003, and in 2008 the organization realized they needed to expand their number of interfaces to connect to other vendors’ systems. Initially they added individual interfaces through the EHR system, but it was a costly process, so MGH decided to go to market to find an interoperability solution that could work with Meditech and was easyto-use, scalable, and cost-effective.

The organization has a medium-sized integration department so it was essential that the solution would be both intuitive and configurable. “We are a medium sized IT department” said MGH’s Clinical Analyst, David Carmichael, “so the platform needs to be fairly easy to use because it’s most likely going to be used by someone that does a lot of other things as well. We also need to be able to keep integration simple but still have some flexibility to make changes to configurations. Rhapsody Integration Engine allows us to be very responsive to vendor requests for change.” Carmichael said that previously the organization was having to pay thousands per individual interface and—with 122 current production connections— the cost was predicted to spiral. The implementation of Rhapsody helped the organization to reduce integration costs while providing a strong platform. “Rhapsody has been tremendously stable, and we never have an issue with it. Support’s great, and it’s saving us a lot of money on a daily basis with our EMR vendor,” Carmichael said.