Q&A: Staff integration is critical to CareGroup app integration effort
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This significant applications change required a rigid strategic integration evaluation effort within the organization’s IT department to make it happen, says Stephen Herzog, Caregroup’s Senior Director of Financial Information Systems, who recently spoke with CMIO about the integration transformation effort.
CMIO: What led CareGroup to select InterSystems’ Ensemble?
Herzog: Our internal technology review process determined that the organization needed to move in new a direction with a Data Integration business partner that was keeping pace with state of the art data integration technology which was becoming a growing concern with the organizations existing integration business partner.
We’re a strong Caché shop due to our in-house-developed suite of Cache based clinical applications. Because Ensemble is a Caché-based application, we felt it gave us better bench strength and applications expertise from the standpoint of additional in-house resources that can support Ensemble. Currently we’re an Oracle/what-used-to-be-Sun/what-used-to-be SeeBeyond data integration customer, and we’re a very small team—two integration analysts and a manager.
With the move to Ensemble, because we have such a large internal programming staff to support our clinical apps in the Caché [object database] space, we were able to easily add additional depth to the Data Integration Services team, and because Ensemble is a good fit in our technology stack, it seemed to be a logical choice.
CMIO: Where are you in the implementation process?
Herzog: We first evaluated Ensemble about two years ago, but at the time we didn’t think it was a suitable replacement in a medical center as large and complex as BIDMC. We opted to give the product time to mature, revisited the product's features and functions in June 2009 and liked what we saw. After determining the product had reached a level of maturity we felt comfortable with, we undertook a thorough proof-of-concept (POC) evaluation to prove to ourselves that we could use the application confidently and competently.
We went through about a six-month POC exercise, tested various types of file transmission protocols used by CareGroup, along with working through a very detailed list of product features and functions to ensure a proper fit to the CareGroup technology stack.
At the end of our proof of concept, we all agreed that it was in the best interest of this medical center to make the move to Ensemble.
CMIO: What new capabilities does the software provide?
Herzog: From a secure FTP perspective, there are significant functional enhancements over what we have today. We’re using a proprietary language and have begun the effort to transition away from our current data integration engine to Ensemble,
Another significant difference between the two products is that Ensemble provides a database and stored transactions [model]. In the current state data integration space at CareGroup, we did not have that capability, so the ability to re-send transactions from the application databases is a big plus for us.
CMIO: What are the biggest challenges you’ve faced?
Herzog: The biggest challenges were basically within the team and principally making the transition from a proprietary Sun/Oracle/SeeBeyond language to Caché for my team, then figuring out how we could all work better as a larger team with the additional Caché strength that we have in the IT department.
In making the transition, we had to jump in feet-first and it was a bit overwhelming at first. We went through all the various stages of [implementation change management]—‘are we really going to do this?’ to a little bit of ‘OK, it sounds like the right thing to do’ to full acceptance. We are now in the full acceptance stage.
We’re now ready to go before our internal IS change control board, present Ensemble as a production-ready platform, and introduce it as a production application. We fully expect to make this presentation for Production approval within the next two weeks, after which [we’ll start] to whittle our way off of the current integration application product and replace existing point-to-point interfaces with Ensemble alternatives.
CMIO: Once the implementation is complete, will end users (clinicians) notice changes?
Herzog: No, it’ll be seamless to them. We’ll be the ‘man behind the curtain’, if you will. This should be a seamless transition to our customer base.
We’re getting ready to prepare to implement [an SCC Softlab laboratory information system] to replace our current in-house-developed CCC clinical lab system, with tentative [implementation] date of June 2011. Currently, that application is in the integration testing stage—we have full ADT (admission-discharge-transfer) orders, results and billing information flowing through Ensemble, to and from the Softlab system and a number of outside systems.
CMIO: Do you anticipate saving money or is this project intended primarily to improve workflow?
Herzog: Cost savings are going to be a wash, from an applications perspective, because we were able to work with [InterSystems] closely on this and make it almost a budget-neutral type situation, from a budgeting perspective.
But from a cost perspective, I see great benefits from our ability … to be able to deliver [integrated applications] in a much quicker time frame, a more efficient time frame, and something that complements our clinical applications—which is the lion’s share of what we use our data integration engine for. So our ability to rapidly develop and deliver efficient, clean working solutions right out of the shoot is going to be a huge time-saver and cost benefit to the organization.