University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Health System

University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Health System is an award-winning academic medical center located in Birmingham, Alabama. They pride themselves in being the premier medical facility in the state and region, and one of the largest academic medical centers in the nation. UAB Health System is a national leader in patient care, research, and training, and is one of US News and World Report’s Best Hospitals. The System is also a winner of the Women’s Choice award.

UAB Health System had a legacy integration engine that had been deprecated by the vendor and was not receiving upgrades or support. This forced the UAB Health System to go to market to find a replacement that is intuitive and easy to use, to allow for quick migration and up-skilling of users. UAB Health System also sought a replacement that supports multiple operating systems, allows users to configure interfaces, and can handle a “massive amount” of throughput.

Rhapsody Integration Engine was chosen as a replacement for the UAB’s legacy engine due to the configurable nature of the platform says Brian Bishop, Integration and Operations Director at UAB Health System. “We were bound by the amount of intervention that we had to do with our older engine, so we wanted something that was easier on our staff, had some self-healing properties, automated alerts, restarts, resets, and error logging.”

He also said that training was also critical to the decision, citing potential issues with migrating from a legacy engine. “One of the things that has been instrumental in our teams ability to go from a 14 year-old product to a modern product is the training. I have been through the training myself and I think that’s one of the things that helped us get started faster. It allowed us to on-board new staff more quickly and also provide our veteran integration analysts with many new ways to do integration.”

Bishop says the UAB uses many of the big healthcare IT platforms and have hundreds of others ancillary systems—which are used by employees across their health system—so it’s essential that an integration engine ties everything together. “We have a very diverse catalog of applications that we use and have some custom integrations that you won’t find anywhere else in the country, if not the world.”

On top of data sharing, UAB has also developed some forward-thinking and unique functionality through Rhapsody. “We have created and started rolling out secured interface lockers to specific departments so that they can manage their own interfaces. We have identified two departments —probably 10 users total—that have IT savvy people in their department and like having access to their data as well as being able to stop and start their interfaces when they need to. And it’s a win/win for us, they get some local control and can support their own interfaces, and my team doesn’t necessarily have to support the day‑to‑day maintenance of those interfaces — which saves a lot of time.”