The Last Mile: Power Your Practice, Not Your Data Conversion

Transitioning to a new EHR is no simple task.

Many organizations don’t realize how far the finish line can be until the first day of your EHR Go-Live. In fact, most will learn that this is where the work starts; and that moving patients’ clinical data from a legacy system can take weeks, most likely months, or even years to be completely reconciled.

Migrating massive sets of electronic medical records isn’t a simple push of the button. Once an automated data migration effort has reached its functional potential, there are inevitable nuances that computer programming simply can’t account for.

From providers and managers to your front and back offices, the transition is overwhelming for the entire practice. Establishing new clinical and operational workflows, while maintaining a positive patient experience is vital. What’s more, the excess workload – updating schedules, allergies, patient histories or moving exam preps – tend to fall on the most overwhelmed.

Along with implementing how your organization decides to use legacy data in a new application environment, ensuring charts are abstraction before your patients’ encounters is crucial. The question is – who has the extra time to do it?

Despite inherent risk for error, potential savings in time (but not money), it seems safe to say:

Clinical data entry requires a human touch.

Recognized as a Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH) according to the National Committee for Quality Assurance, this multi-specialty practice delivers nearly a quarter of a million patient encounters annually. According to NCQA, more than 95 organizations support NCQA Recognition to over 10,000 practices across the country.

With more than 50+ board certified physicians and mid-level providers, our client prides itself on serving as one of the municipal leaders in its hometown, as well as one of the largest employers in its area. Aside from its great impact on its community, the mission to deliver access to comprehensive, team-based care with goal-oriented clinical interoperability has delivered well-deserved recognition.

In order to achieve this status, the NCQA PCMH model requires, among other foundational aspects of transformational care, is EHR Optimization.

Coordination is the most important factor in delivering comprehensive care. SaaM is proud to say has it was also the most important factor in delivering this successful project.

To preserve the identity of our client, this case study will remain anonymous.

The weekend was quickly approaching when our Director of HealthIT, Matt Mogan, receives a phone call.

“We need help.“

Our client and its data migration vendor had run into errors in data mapping points, which were slated to execute over the weekend leading up to a practice-wide EHR Go-Live. Due to timing of the scheduled Go-Live, this meant that our client had very few options, as correcting the migration would require more time than was available.

SaaM and its Consultant Network were selected to complete more than 75,000 chart abstractions.

After analyzing patient volume, our team quickly understood that with a runway of just four business days, plus the weekend – this was going to be a challenging race to meet the demand and ensure abstractions arrive before patients.

To get work started as quickly as possible, we coordinated with our clients’ Information Technology & Cybersecurity teams to establish a HIPAA-Compliant workflow protocol for a team of remote abstractors. This involved quickly submitting rosters, completing client-required HIPAA training, and onboarding our team with appropriate user access.

During this time, our project manager worked with the Quality Manager to establish a data conversion strategy which would accommodate the needs and requirements of the providers and planned clinical workflows.

Orientation guides were produced as guidance for adherence to the client requirements. Furthermore, our project manager held training sessions to get team members up to speed once onboarding was complete.

Our core philosophy is simplification. The first step of our project initiation phase is to have our experts learn and fully understand the nuanced processes of clinical workflows in order to develop optimal workflows for a successful delivery.

In order to meet minimum requirements of clinical chart abstractions that would exceed daily patient volume, we prepared a team for scale. Through custom reporting, our project management team identified key metrics to forecast resource requirements for a constantly moving target.

Our Sourced by SaaM model delivered immediate onboarding, deployment and scaling of appropriately-skilled workers needed to meet objectives.

A lot of learning occurs in the infancy of any project, so we prepared for this through prioritized abstraction queues. From scratch, we built progress dashboards for our client to observe in real time. The client then prioritized our work list by appointment type, patient department, and most importantly: appointment date and time to identify patients who needed their electronic health data migrated first.

Client dashboards and custom-built abstraction queues were created to provide a prioritized list of patients based on needs. For example: less than a week into work, the Quality Manager recognized the need for Wellness Visits to be prioritized. As a patient-centered practice, not doing so would require patients to re-enter their entire chart histories as though they were a first-time patient.

Dedicated to continuity of care and upholding a high standard of patient care, our team made appropriate changes in our workflow to accommodate this patient population.

By offering a remote team of clinical data abstractors, our Sourced by SaaM Model works when your providers don’t. Our team works continuously across four time zones.

Thanks to our Consultant Network, we were able to create a timely solution to an urgent problem. The partnership also led to a successful outsourcing relationship for approximately 11.5 months. Considering the cost-savings of outsourcing this work to SaaM, compared to internal hiring or adding workload to current staff members, our client realized the incredible value of our specialist network.

“This was definitely a complicated counting process with a constantly moving target and we value your integrity based on the quality of work, self-management and exceptional benefit that SaaM has brought to our project.”