24

FEBRUARY, 2017

Use Case

Overview

A regional hospital in Massachusetts decided to migrate their legacy eGate interface environment to Orion Health’s Rhapsody integration engine to ensure they could handle the more robust needs that came with being part of a Health Information Exchange (HIE). They reached out to Core Health Technologies to bring on help for the migration to the new system.

Challenge

Support for their current integration engine was no longer available from the vendor, leading them to seek out a new solution. They chose to migrate from eGate to Rhapsody since it offers a lot of development similarities but is much more robust.

The hospital required an easy way to implement web service interfaces and exchange CDA documents; and an eGate to Rhapsody migration offered a much more modern, feature-rich platform with those traits.

After selecting Rhapsody, the hospital’s IT team reached out to Orion Health for support and ultimately decided they were unlikely to get the level of help they’d need to successfully migrate their system. This led them to look for consulting services from an organization with deep Rhapsody expertise specific to their use cases.

They needed assistance from a company that could simultaneously help implement the new system, train their existing staff, and provide backup support for their team later in the project.

They would also need someone who could guide them through the process of understanding, designing, and implementing web service interfaces, which their existing team hadn’t worked with before. The new system would need to serve as a gateway, not just to the internal and ancillary systems, but also to the outside world—systems like those offered by the CDC and other government agencies, for example.

Solution

Core Health Technologies could offer them significant experience with both e*Gate and Rhapsody. The expert placed on the project had previously worked with SeeBeyond as an e*Gate product architect and later led Orion Health’s Rhapsody team in North America. During his time at Orion, the consultant developed a number of training programs still in use at Orion Health, so the hospital leadership was confident he could help guide the in-house IT team through the certification process.

The project included ensuring that the architecture followed general integration and Rhapsody-specific best practices as the interfaces were migrated to the new platform. Core Health Technologies was able to step in throughout the project to help build complex interfaces or components when they arose, resolve issues within the system interfaces, and work in parallel with the in-house IT team, moving their old environment to the new environment while simultaneously implementing the new interfaces as needed.

The Core consultant who worked on this project also helped mentor the IT staff in writing JavaScript for interrogating and manipulating the data within their system, and worked to transfer knowledge, to ensure the in-house team could handle the majority of support moving forward.

Rather than paying for a generic vendor-run training class or having a custom training program developed, Core was able to structure the training more as a knowledge transfer — integrating it into the larger migration project. By the end of the project, the hospital’s in-house team had earned their Rhapsody certification.

Results
Once the hospital’s IT team had successfully completed the migration to Rhapsody, with help from Core’s consultant, they were able to join the Mass Highway HIE. This experience has allowed them to continue to complete and enhance their internal enterprise-wide integration as well as easily connect to external systems. The hospital is now able to consume and provision their own data along with data from sources external to the enterprise.

For example, they can use the system to track information on the average number of patients that come through their doors on a day-to-day basis so they can better forecast inventory needs for the Materials Management department and staff requirements at a particular time of year (like during flu season).

And it provides clinicians with data on a patient level — allowing the system to make requests from other systems for specific data, querying the larger HIE community to look for data on a particular patient regardless of what the system or enterprise is.

Post-migration, today the hospital boasts a very robust, flexible integration layer that allows them to quickly spin up new interfaces and integrate quickly with new systems. It allows them to adapt quickly and integrate successfully both internally and externally. Their internal IT team is able to manage the majority of their needs in-house, and their senior staff is knowledgeable enough to train additional internal resources, as needed. As a result of this project, they now have the tools needed to continue to grow and remain competitive within the healthcare space.