KDMC, a 60-bed facility, which supports patients from a five-county region, partnered with BridgeHead Software, experts in healthcare application retirement, to lead the project.
With the decommissioning of KDMC’s legacy EHR solution, MEDITECH Magic; almost 700,000 patient records have been migrated to HealthStore during the 6-month implementation programme. As a single repository, HealthStore consolidates, stores and protects patient data, enabling clinicians to access and retrieve patient information at the point of care.
“We wanted to work with a team with concrete experience in retiring legacy data applications. BridgeHead provides peace of mind, not only knowing that you can show and teach staff how to use HealthStore and feel confident that they will pick it up easily, but the reassurance that everything they need is at their fingertips. I also wanted to ensure the protection of the legacy EHR data and felt very comfortable with the security capabilities that HealthStore provides,” said Kevin Kimble, Data Systems Specialist at KDMC.
Continuing to run legacy systems is a drain on resources for healthcare organizations, costing time, resource, and money. Legacy solutions also pose a greater security risk and are more vulnerable to cyberattack over time. However, the move to HealthStore provides better all-round data protection and has facilitated cost savings in terms of the manpower to run and maintain these systems, as well as licensing, hosting of servers, power, cooling, and more. By retiring the MEDITECH MAGIC system, KDMC was also able to decommission all of the associated equipment used to run the legacy EHR.
Furthermore, it has streamlined working practices, enabling clinical and non-clinical staff to securely access historical and current data quickly and easily. HealthStore’s intuitive timeline functionality enables a summary full view of a patient’s history and displays the corresponding number of documents for each patient by month and year, whether clinical, financial, or administrative.
Jim Beagle, President and CEO at BridgeHead Software comments, “When healthcare organizations recognise their legacy EHR systems are no longer delivering sufficient value to justify their continued support and maintenance, it’s time to explore how best to decommission those applications – and KDMC is a prime example of how to embark on an effective application retirement project. Not only has KDMC saved precious time and money on supporting an out-of-date system, it has provided the workforce with the right tools to access valuable legacy data quickly, easily, and securely, to ultimately support improved patient care.”
