The health system wanted to turn off NextGen so it could reduce the cost and complexity of having multiple systems up and running, but it needed to keep those legacy records easily accessible to clinicians and the healthcare information management team. AltaMed also needed to comply with record retention requirements.
Migrating all of the data to Epic was not feasible or affordable, so staff considered their options and turned to archiving. They went out to bid and chose a vendor.
“We started down the road of archiving our two NextGen data sources, which included ambulatory, dental and revenue cycle records,” recalled Emmet Jacobs, director of enterprise applications at AltaMed. “Unfortunately, the project did not go smoothly. During implementation, we found many errors in the archived data.”
It also became clear the vendor could not handle the complexity of the dental records that required extraction and migration. AltaMed had odontogram dental images to archive, which represented about 27 terabytes of unique data with special formatting that needed to be preserved to ensure the color in the images was retained. This detail is important for the dentist to see.
“As the vendor was not able to deliver the scope of work, we were forced to halt the project mid-stream,” Jacobs said. “Our support agreement with NextGen was ending soon, which drove an aggressive timeline to find a better solution. It was critical that we didn’t experience gap inaccessibility to the patient records for our clinical and HIM teams.”
AltaMed staff met with the team from vendor Harmony Healthcare IT and talked through the challenges they faced.
“They had a lot of experience with archiving NextGen, but had not dealt with odontograms before,” Jacobs noted. “After a bit of investigation, they said they were confident they could deliver on the project. Harmony Healthcare IT worked through the unique image management from the services side and then customized their archive to store the complex dental components that were important to this project.”
The health system evaluated the Harmony product HealthData Archiver, which is the user interface for accessing the consolidated legacy data. It met the needs of the clinical and HIM teams to easily access the historic patient records, so AltaMed moved forward with the vendor.
“The simplicity and intuitive nature of the HealthData Archiver interface really wowed our team and gave us the confidence we needed to move forward,” Jacobs said. “We knew we needed a tool that was easy to use while also meeting all of the complexities that came with the unique dental imagery. This solution gave us all of that and then some.”