RWJBarnabas Health

RWJBarnabas Health is a network of award-winning independent healthcare providers in New Jersey that arose from the merger of Barnabas Health and Robert Wood Johnson Health System in 2016. It is the largest and most comprehensive healthcare system in the state of New Jersey as well as the largest healthcare employer in the state; it provides treatment and services to more than three million patients each year.

RWJBarnabas Health brings together the best of academic medicine, research and teaching, and community partners across numerous academic centers, acute care facilities, and research hospitals. The network is also partnered with Rutgers University to train and educate more than 1,000 medical residents and interns throughout their network every year.

Before the RWJBarnabas Health merger began, both Robert Wood Johnson Health System and Barnabas Health independently chose Rhapsody to replace their legacy systems. In the case of Barnabas Health, the network had been using a legacy eGate integration engine before deciding to put a request for proposal (RFP) to the market. The challenge was finding a robust interoperability platform that could connect multiple sites, support close to 2000 interfaces, was easy-to-learn and operate, and, most importantly, could easily migrate from their legacy engine.

The RFP process resulted in three platforms being selected for proof-of-concepts and demos. Rhapsody met all of the requirements, and more, and was awarded the contract. Following the merger and the initial Rhapsody implementation, RWJBarnabas Health’s integration expertise were consolidated into a single enterprise integration department. The department now supports the entire RWJBarnabas Health system and has already implemented Rhapsody in 11 of their hospitals. They are now working on a number of new projects, including a largescale implementation that requires over 80 interfaces to be rewritten and another 800 interfaces still to be converted.