While investigating different Electronic Health Records systems, I approached a local clinician with an offer to exchange my program management time for the opportunity to observe how an EHR was used in a clinical setting. It was my good fortune to discover they had just kicked off a migration of their patient records from one EHR (Practice Fusion) to another (CareCloud).
Role
As the only PM and technical resource on this project, I met with each of the individuals involved in the migration to understand their roles and processes, and following that, I proposed several improvements to make their migration faster, less expensive, and more secure. I acted as day-to-day project manager, quality assurance, and technical support in both systems.
Challenges
As is typical of small healthcare providers, this office did not have an IT staff or any additional budget to extend capabilities beyond the manual process they had created and I had streamlined. This meant that my proposals for use of an API or a screen scrape were not possible.
Additionally, I reached out to Practice Fusion and inquired as to the legal restrictions of accessing an API, this was definitely out of scope for the time and budget allowed.
As a last resort, the clinic was offered the option for a download of their data, but with conditions - a download could not occur until their account was deactivated, and they would only receive files that were directly uploaded into the system. Any data added to Practice Fusion via their UX would not be available, and unfortunately this included all prescription, chart note, and patient demographics.
Finally, the practice could not close down while this migration was taking place. Patient data needed to be in the new system before a patient arrived for a visit. This meant migrating and maintaining two systems concurrently until the migration was complete.