moving to Epic – best practices for the downstream systems

[John Bonnie]

Hello all,

We’re in the early phases of moving from Paragon to Epic.  Even though Epic is a integrated system, most of our existing systems we interface to via Cloverleaf will stay.

I’m wondering what your thoughts are regarding converting the downstream systems, like all the adt receiver systems.  Is is better to rebuild them with Epic code sets or translate the Epic adts and turn them back into Paragon adt’s so the downstram systems will see little or no change?

Topic

[James Cobane]

John,

We went down the road of mapping the new Epic values to the legacy values because we had phased implementations, so it was more of necessity than desire.  In hindsight, it would have been better to force the downstream systems to adapt/accept the new code sets.  Since you will be engaging with your downstream system vendors anyway (for testing, etc.), it would probably be better to “bite the bullet” and make the systems adapt.  This will also give you an opportunity to standardize as well, as you probably have a mixture of code sets that are going to the downstream systems.

Once the vendors find out that you are changing your source system, they often state “…well, this is essentially a new interface” and will likely treat it as such anyway.  We ran into this with several vendors, even though we were essentially going to “make it look like the existing interface”.

We also underwent consolidation of many of the downstream apps as well; i.e. different hospitals using different apps for specific functionality were standardized to the same application and/or system.

This would be a good opportunity to clean up some of the things that you have been probably wanting to fix/change anyway.

My $.02

Jim Cobane

Henry Ford Health

[Sergey Sevastyanov]

Hi John,

We just switched over to Epic from Paragon this past weekend and today is our first weekday with Epic.

We used a mixed approach and for some downstream systems we chose the vendors to adopt Epic format while for some other systems we just translated Epic messages to Paragon format to make it transparent for the receiving system.

I tend to agree with Jim that it’s better to have the vendor to take new Epic format messages. Not only this will make your code clearer but also it’s not always possible to translate Epic messages to Paragon format because these two systems are so different.

[Author]

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