The Challenge:
Holy Cross Hospital is a 49 bed community full service hospital servicing the Taos, New Mexico area. With a small IT staff in place they are managing a fully integrated MEDITECH healthcare information system including advanced clinical modules such as Operating Room and Emergency Department.
Holy Cross was experiencing recurring issues when testing MEDITECH bug and enhancement changes since test and live databases were not synchronized. It had become common practice at Holy Cross to create new entries in their live system yet fail to create them in test. As the IT staff would try to troubleshoot issues or test upgrades they were continuously stopped due to the inconsistency of data.
In addition to general system maintenance they were preparing to overhaul their Operating Room Management module and due to the complexity of the dictionaries MEDITECH would not move changes from the Holy Cross test dictionaries to the live dictionaries. This laborious process would have to be manually addressed by their already stretched IT staff.
The Solution:
Holy Cross had been tackling dictionary synchronization for years using a grueling non-efficient manual process. MEDITECH did not provide tools within the software to compare dictionaries across platforms and version. The hunt was on to find an easy to use and affordable product proven in the MEDITECH industry. Holy Cross researched the marketplace and in 2008 contracted with Summit Healthcare for their InSync product.
The Summit InSync product solved a variety of issues at Holy Cross including elimination of manual dictionary maintenance which had been a recurring issue at their facility. Implementing InSync resulted in the reallocation of IT staff which allowed them to work on priority projects. In addition, the hospital executive team felt confident that the MEDITECH data was accurate and thoroughly tested to meet the highest of patient safety standards.
The Summit InSync product is currently being used to synchronize the B/AR, Material Management and Operating Room Management dictionaries because of the financial impact to the facility. The long term strategic IT goal at Holy Cross is to utilize Summit InSync dictionary synchronization product across the enterprise in 2010.
Engagement Highlights:
- Streamlined their ORM advanced clinical implementation by reducing the amount of time manually moving dictionary changes from test to live. This resulted in huge time savings and reallocation of IT resources.
- Holy Cross successfully synchronized all critical financial dictionaries to minimize any negative impact on the hospital bottom line. Dictionary highlights include B/AR, MM and ORM.
Testimonials |
“The Summit InSync product was extremely useful during our Operating Room Management implementation as we were able to reduce the time spent by our IT staff as they made sure all dictionaries were moved from test to live. We felt confident that we were migrating clean, accurate data since this process was carefully reviewed and automated. Our goal is to continue to add additional hospital departments and begin synchronizing all of our MEDITECH dictionaries.”
-Rosemary Hammer, IT Analyst, Holy Cross Hospital |