Capital Region Medical Center
The Client
Capital Region Medical Center (CRMC) in Jefferson City, MO. is an affiliate hospital of University of Missouri Health Care. It encompasses a full service hospital and an expansive clinic system covering eight counties. The hospital’s Inpatient Rehabilitation Center is one of the few accredited hospital-based rehabilitation centers in the state.
The Situation
Because of the organization’s size and number of clinics within its system, CRMC found itself with 23 separate installs of an outdated version of eClinicalWorks®. Once it became possible to do so, they sought a way to create one centralized system.
Ero Health was chosen, in part, because the team had helped CRMC in the past. Ero Health’s experience with health care practices in general, their extensive knowledge of health care IT and their specific knowledge of eClinicalWorks® made them an ideal resource.
The Client's Need
Capital Region Medical Center had a need to consolidate patient data into one central system from its 23 separate eClinicalWorks® systems. Each system housed both patient demographic information, as well a clinical documentation associated with each patient. There was also high probability that the same patient, visiting multiple clinics for various specialties, tests or treatments, had a separate record within each of the clinic’s eClinicalWorks® systems.
This posed a challenge for a number of reasons. In a centralized system, the goal is to create one record for each patient. However, there was a possibility that variances could exist in the data entry from one system to another, making matching up patient records difficult. CRMC wanted to ensure that multiple patient records were not created for each patient, so the data matching process must be precise. Also, it was crucial that record from different patients didn’t inadvertently overlap, causing clinical data to be included for the wrong record. Finally, it was imperative that all of the data be moved to the centralized system, with nothing missing.
CRMC needed to make sure their partner for this project could manage that level of accuracy with no mistakes.
How Ero Helped
Ero Health helped CRMC define which data would be consolidated and which would simply be moved to the centralized database. To accomplish the level of accuracy necessary for the data migration, Ero Health developed a comprehensive data matching process that would help ensure that duplicate patient data would not be migrated to the new system, and that the proper data was matched with the proper record.
Extensive testing was performed prior to launch to ensure the accuracy of the data. This testing also included the identification of pieces missing in the original process design. Solutions for those pieces were presented and implemented as the process unfolded.
The Results
Access to information and sharing between CRMC’s multiple locations is much faster and easier, now that it is centralized. This has improved patient care, as well as the patient experience, because all patient data is located in one database. All providers have access to the same information, in the same location, without delays in communicating or transferring data from clinic to clinic.
