A work plan to successfully complete a data conversion project in a hospital
Conversion projects are under pressure to become more efficient while facing increasing complexity. Resource limitations may restrict the transferability of clinical data, as data from a proprietary EHR system cannot seamlessly integrate with a new EHR system and conversion is needed. Converting data to ensure full accessibility in the new system can be a time-consuming and expensive process, taking weeks or even months to complete due to its complexity.
Meander Medical Center is at the dawn of such a big EHR conversion project; the hospital is moving from a 鈥榖est of breed鈥� strategy to an EHR suite which means that many of the current healthcare applications will be replaced by one system. The goal of this project is to define a conversion approach and strategy for Meander Medical Center. There鈥檚 done benchmarking of conversion strategies at other hospitals. Next to that, physician end-users and key stakeholders were actively involved to develop this approach. And lastly, many analysis were performed to perceive insights about the complexity of the information landscape and to determine the right variables of the strategy.
Five options for the conversion strategy were defined; 1) the data quality approach, 2) the patient-centered approach, 3) the priority of healthcare professional approach, 4) a completely filled the target-EHR by AI or 5) a clean conversion but with an integrated GPT-model in our target-EHR executed on the full EHR-archive.
The conclusion of this project is that Meander Medical Center should follow the data quality approach. More investigation should be done during the preparation phase on the GPT-model integration, this will facilitate healthcare professionals in the availability of key patient information. Good data quality, data availability and data accessibility play a critical role in supporting the adaptation of a new EHR system.
Lastly, the project delivered a work plan to successfully complete a data conversion project in a hospital, including an overview of conversion principles and risks, an approach to execute a conversion and a framework for measuring clinical data quality.