This is part of our data migration blog series – a range of topics intended to help organizations who are migrating from one EHR to another.

Once you have decided to migrate your current EHR to a new system, proper staffing of the project will be imperative to the success of your migration. Employing the right clinical staff will provide various perspectives on how your new EHR will accurately display patient data from your legacy system. Their clinical experience and knowledge of your workflows will play a huge role in your migration throughout the entirety of the project.

How they can help:  The staff that you employ to help with your migration will ensure exceptional levels of accuracy with patient data. We recommend “EHR-savvy” resources that will help to produce deliverables on time, meet important milestones, and to minimize risk to the project. They should attend weekly status calls, collaborate with project leaders in decision making, lead validation efforts, and assist with end-user training prior to your Go-Live.

What roles they will play:  We recommend involving resources that are familiar with all facets of your organization; including clinical workflows, legacy system build, target system implementation status, and clinical perspective per  clinical element. We identify some of these resources as nursing staff, physician champions, medical assistants, laboratory analysts, and scheduling staff. We recommend that these resources are involved in the following migration phases:

• Review Mapping – Galen will typically take on the task to map legacy system values to the target system values. Once our first pass is complete, it is very important to have a client side expert review and sign-off on the mapping. For example – an allergy reaction of “Nausea and vomiting” may only map to “Nausea” in your target system. The requirement of your staff is to ensure that this clinically makes sense for your patient population, or if a new entry needs to be built. The mappings performed throughout the project will depend on the scope of your project and could potentially require a specialist in Medications, Allergies, Problems, Orders, Results, and Documents.
• Validation efforts – The clinical staff on the team will provide important feedback on the data that is migrated into the target system over the course of the project. Clinical feedback during the testing and validation stages is your main opportunity for issue identification, determining clinical relevancy of the data, and how it will display and act in your new target system.
• Decision making – Throughout the course of the migration we will encounter situations in which clinical decisions need to be made that will impact the user experience in the target system. Having clinical resources readily available to assist in the discussion of the element in question will be imperative to making the right decisions for your organization. For example, identifying what details are important to carry into the migration, such as Active Problem annotations or Staging details will need to have feedback from your clinical staff to determine the best way to migrate them.

How many people will be needed: There is no set number of resources that we recommend being involved with your migration project. We aim to have at least one lead resource ‘per clinical element’ that is in scope of the project. We recommend utilizing the same resources throughout the project so that they then become the subject matter experts and can then be used as lead resources in the target EHR. Employing these clinical resources from the start of your project helps to avoid any impacts to patient care during the migration.

The strategy discussed above isdesigned to meet client requirements, which include  preserving the data integrity while supporting continuity of care during the transition.  When designing your migration team, be sure to focus first on how you will be supporting them, and be clear about expectations and the types of commitments they will make to the project.

To learn all the ways Galen can help you successfully migrate to a new target EHR, check out our full Data Migration Blog Series for more insight, or contact us below: