The challenge

The organization acquired a major hospital and converted its electronic health record (EHR) system from Cerner Millennium to Siemens Soarian Clinicals. Then, Cerner purchased Siemens.

A year later, in mid-2016, the organization had to move back to Cerner Millennium and unify patient records across acute and ambulatory care. To minimize the impact on end users and operations, the choice was made to integrate the new clinical system with Soarian Financials instead of replacing it. A big bang go-live was planned for early 2018, and many other downstream projects relied on this initiative meeting its timeline.

Delays would cause substantial cost overruns and block other information systems projects with new facilities.

The solution

The healthcare organization asked Atos, a global leader in digital transformation, to plan and execute the implementation of Cerner Millennium and the one-patient, one-record initiative. This mammoth undertaking involved replacing not only Soarian Clinicals but also a host of other legacy applications:

• Laboratory
• Emergency department
• Radiology
• Surgery
• Pharmacy
• Behavioral health
• Ambulatory urgent care and occupational health clinics.

Business benefit

One of the program’s major goals was electronic physician documentation. To help with physician adoption, program governance prioritized voice-recognition software as a late addition to the scope of work. Pre-conversion, three transcription vendors had individual interfaces to the legacy EHR system. Post-conversion, with the new voice-recognition software, only one transcription vendor is needed. Not only are physicians more likely to adopt electronic documentation, but the capability also decreased transcription use by 90%.