Adventist Hinsdale Hospital
OCIE® Legacy Conversion SupportThe best and most economical way to decommission a legacy system is to use the OCIE archive to hold all the historical content for inquiry and trend analysis. This also allows the conversion to the new system to minimize the data elements converted because they don't have to convert elements just for the purposes of inquiry as those inquiries can be satisfied by OCIE. This functionality is generic and maybe use for any Legacy application. An example of this is the decommissioning of hospital laboratory systems as described below.
Adventist Hinsdale Hospital uses OCIE to support long-term, retrieval requirements for legacy patient pathology reports
Company Background
For more than 100 years, Adventist Hinsdale Hospital has provided superior health care with Christian compassion to residents in the western suburbs of Chicago. As the only teaching hospital in DuPage County, Hinsdale Hospital’s team of physicians, nurses and staff are dedicated to bringing the finest medicine to the community. The team utilizes the latest life-saving tools and techniques in their pursuit of improving lives and alleviating suffering and their 276-bed hospital is recognized as a leader in a wide range of medical fields, where university-level care and medical breakthroughs are achieved each day.
The Situation
Hinsdale Hospital implemented a new Pathology Laboratory System (Cerner) and was supporting and preserving patient-critical pathology/lab information within a static pathology laboratory system called CoPath. The retention requirements on the patient information residing in CoPath extends well beyond 10+ years and in some cases must be retained forever. Hinsdale, like many other hospitals, thought they had only two options available to them and would be faced with significant costs and challenges to accommodate their legacy information. As an alternative, Donnell Systems presented OCIE as a third option that would save them significant time and resources.
Option 1:
Invest significant administrative, technology and support dollars in purchasing hardware and software to upgrade the CoPath system so Hinsdale can ensure patient pathology/lab results are accessible and viewable over time. Not only can the initial investment, plus the installation, technical and programming efforts, be cost prohibitive, but there are on-going costs associated with this option as well. On-going costs such as, yearly hardware and software licensing and maintenance fees, personnel cost of employee(s) to administer and support the system, and on-going hardware re-purchases when initial hardware becomes end-of-life or no longer supportable. Support for this option must be 24/7; keeping multiple resources involved with the system. This option would be expensive.
Option 2:
Transition data elements in CoPath to a database and query system; which in this case could be difficult to program, would be complicated for users, and create a time-consuming 10% audit requirement to ensure data elements were transitioned correctly. This option would be complicated and challenging.
“OCIE came very highly recommended… We have been extremely happy with OCIE for almost 3 years now. We appreciate the ease of use, as well as the dependability of the product. We have had virtually no downtime and the customer service group is always readily available to answer questions, troubleshoot, or help us in any way they can. I continue to be extremely impressed with Mary Hertel, Jennifer, and the rest of the Donnell team.”
– Dale Gironda, Adventist Health System, Adventist Hinsdale Lab Partners
The OCIE Solution
Decommissioning or “pulling the plug” on a static LIS legacy system like CoPath is a step in the right direction, but choosing the right strategy is equally as important. The right strategy is OCIE by Donnell Systems. Rather than moving data from one complex database to another and re-inventing system logic, OCIE’s Enterprise Content Management solution offers a more cost effective and simpler approach to their legacy system requirements.
OCIE as a managed service makes it possible for Hinsdale Hospital to archive all pathology reports residing in CoPath and safeguard their intellectual property (in this case the patient-critical reports) yet avoid the technology risk and steep costs for administration, equipment, and storage. The managed service option reduces many of the resources needed from IT, and allows IT to focus on other revenue-generating projects that save time, effort and money.
With OCIE, Hinsdale Hospital met its goal to retain patient-critical information from their legacy CoPath system and deliver the information in a secure, affordable solution. By transforming manual processes that are labor intensive and extremely time consuming into reliable electronic processes that require less human interaction, Hinsdale significantly increased office productivity and archived its legacy information for the future. There are future plans being formulated to exploit more of the system’s capabilities in other company divisions and departments as well.
OCIE key benefits include:
- Fast return on investment
- Complete hardware and software support through OCIE managed service
- Frees up IT to focus on new systems
- Improved responsiveness to customer inquiries and better customer service
- Eliminated physical printing and transfer of legacy information to OCIE archive through automation
- Continued support of CoPath patient-critical documents through OCIE’s easy to use interface
- Fast, secure and easy access to patient pathology records