Customer Spotlight: Boulder Community Hospital Successfully Migrates to Meditech 6.0

Boulder Community Hospital a non-profit, community owned facility with 265 licensed beds successfully migrated from Meditech Magic to Meditech 6.0 on October 1, 2009.

In the beginning stages of their migration planning, Boulder Community Hospital recognized the need to streamline their current interface environment including integration with local Physician Offices. Boulder realized quickly that interface management in addition to the tasks surrounding the Meditech 6.0 migration was daunting and time consuming for the already stretched staff. Evaluation of their existing interface landscape revealed three different vendor interface engines in place which was difficult to manage and costly to maintain. They also had some immediate concerns with data migration and dictionary maintenance.

"Boulder Community Hospital selected Summit Healthcare because of their proven track record for streamlining complex interface environments. The Summit Healthcare solution will replace two engines at BCH and not only will this save the hospital money, but it will allow us to implement interfaces faster and with fewer resources,” remarked Linda Minghella, Chief Information Officer at Boulder Community Hospital.

Planning for the migration road ahead

Once their migration plan was mapped out, Boulder Community Hospital began investigating integration vendors in the Meditech space that could assist with interface migration and also had the expertise and technology to support the new Meditech 6.0 platform.

After careful research, the decision was quickly made to partner with Summit Healthcare as their one integration vendor. Summit Healthcare, experts in the industry for interface management and automation, could provide a comprehensive toolset including professional services to augment the BCH staff. The product toolset that would streamline Boulder’s Meditech 6.0 migration was Summit Apex; an integrated product suite re-engineered and built to accommodate the new Meditech 6.0 platform.

The first challenge to address was consolidation and clean up of the existing BCH interface landscape. By consolidating from three interface engine vendors down to one, BCH would immediately see ROI by saving dollars on point to point interface maintenance and reallocation of staff FTE’s. Summit Express Connect, the Summit Healthcare interface engine was implemented as the one interface engine that would not only alleviate the interface cluster but would allow BCH to leverage all feeds for connection to other vendor systems and physicians offices.

Now that the technology was in place, the second issue to address was the current staff bandwidth at Boulder Community Hospital. As part of a complete integration package, Summit Healthcare would provide Integration Outsourcing professional services to migrate all existing interfaces and subsequently manage integration efforts. This multi-year agreement provided assistance for both a short term and long term arrangement. In the short term BCH could concentrate on priority application migration efforts and go live efforts. For the long term Boulder would be positioned to eventually bring their interface management in-house should they see fit.

In addition to the interface engine and outsourcing services, Boulder Community Hospital utilized both the Summit Scripting Toolkit and Summit InSync for their migration project. Summit Scripting Toolkit, a robust proven scripting tool for the Meditech 6.0 platform was used for various data migration projects. One specific project was to migrate HR data from another vendor system; Ceridian, to the new HR application in the Meditech 6.0 platform. SST was used to extract data from Ceridian and then script this data into the Meditech 6.0 HR application. SST 7 has been proven time and time again to handle the intricacies of the new 6.0 Meditech screens which translates to reliable and stable scripting for our clients each time, every time.

Summit InSync , the leading dictionary extraction and analysis product on the market today, aided in dictionary maintenance and clean migration of data to their Meditech 6.0 test and live rings. One particular example was the comparison of their MIS user dictionary from their Magic Live system to their 6.0 Test system. Once discrepancies were analyzed and addressed they then compared this dictionary from their 6.0 Test to 6.0 Live to ensure that all data was clean for go live. Summit InSync provided the ability to accomplish what would have otherwise been a daunting and time consuming task with room for user error. Now live, BCH has the tool to ensure their new Meditech 6.0 test and live dictionaries remain “in sync” benefiting all departments across the enterprise and ensuring patient safety.

Integration and Data Migration Success! Live with Meditech 6.0

After many hours of hard work by the Boulder Community staff and Summit Healthcare, the Meditech 6.0 live was successful, on time and on budget. October 1, 2009 was the go live date with all applications up and running including seamless integration with the other vendor systems and the physician offices. As of go live, the total live interface count was 55 including bi-directional communication with the physician offices.

BCH felt confident that all necessary data had migrated successfully and that the health of both their test and live dictionaries in the new 6.0 platform were excellent.

"After reviewing Boulder Community Hospital’s IT strategic goals it quickly became apparent that they needed an integration partner to assist them during the Meditech 6.0 migration. With the migration to Meditech 6.0, BCH would be bringing on additional advanced clinical departments as well as integrating bi-directionally with Physician Office practices which required more complex integration needs. Our goal was to provide Boulder Community Hospital with a streamlined and closely managed interface migration including assisting with data and dictionary migration efforts,” remarked Nathia Karasch, VP Engineering, Summit Healthcare.

To learn more about Boulder Community Hospital, see their web site at: http://bch.org/.

To learn more about Summit Healthcare, see their web site at: http://www.summit-healthcare.com/.