Soarian Clinicals and Soarian Financials Legacy Support Case Study

UMass Memorial Health, Worcester, Massachusetts

About the Client

UMass Memorial Health (UMass) is the largest healthcare system in Central Massachusetts. It serves as the clinical partner of UMass Chan Medical School, with access to the latest technology, research and clinical trials. The healthcare system includes UMass Memorial Medical Center, HealthAlliance-Clinton Hospital, Marlborough Hospital and Harrington Hospital. DNV accredited, UMass has 1,177 beds with over 1,600 physicians on the active medical staff and over 12,000 employees.

Project Details

In January 2016, Stoltenberg Consulting won UMass' enterprise-wide legacy application support contract, as the healthcare system moved to a more cohesive, integrated EHR landscape with its transition to Epic. To start the project, Stoltenberg paid careful attention learning UMass business processes and more importantly, the culture of the organization, while reviewing internal workload of ticket backlog and planned projects.

Stoltenberg supported over 90 applications, including Oracle Cerner Soarian Financials and Clinicals, Pharmacy, NOVIUS, Syngo, Imagecast (RIS/PACS), Allscripts Touchworks (Altera), Carefusion/Pyxis, 3M, DBMotion, Pulsecheck, IDX, MEDITECH Lab and Hyland OnBase (LMR), while handling over 100 interfaces between systems. In a seamless transition, the Stoltenberg team cost-effectively absorbed internal responsibilities with just 48 resources. This was accomplished with 40 percent fewer resources than UMass originally staffed in these roles.

To further assist the client, Stoltenberg's Financial Team Manager was asked by UMass to serve as their sole IT Representative on three of their highly strategic key department teams. These included the A/R Outsourcing Vendor Selection Committee, which created the RFP and awarded the outsourcing contract for all acute and physician business office legacy A/R; the Senior Executive Revenue Cycle Review Committee, which tracked monthly A/R metrics and set benchmarks for monthly revenue and cash collection; and the Senior Executive Laboratory Management Team, which led multiple lab analyzer upgrades and deployed a new specimen process and delivery system before the Epic go live. By collaborating and sharing extensive industry knowledge and deep project experiences, Stoltenberg assisted each of these UMass teams to fully prepare and plan for a successful, smooth Epic transition.

Because of the trusted partnership and Stoltenberg's ability to quickly move into and fulfill the legacy support positions, UMass' internal staff could focus their undivided attention on the Epic migration to achieve greater stabilization across the care continuum. In addition to the full legacy EHR support daily activities, the Stoltenberg teams were instrumental in Epic transition projects, including data conversion assistance, extract definition, extract scheduling, storage migration, decommissioning, Epic cutover steps for legacy systems and interfaces, and Epic system validation meetings.

Stoltenberg created over 40 detailed step-by-step migration plans for legacy applications to ensure a successful and complete Epic cutover during the go live. These plans included scoping user accounts to modify; assessing interfaces to switch out or remain; monitoring day-end processes for full completion; and communicating hourly with the bridge line for ancillary department workflows. Post go live, UMass asked the Stoltenberg team for continued support to assist with the legacy applications' archive and decommission project. The Stoltenberg team validated extract results and reviewed the quality of archived data for UMass and the archive vendor's team.