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The two acute care facilities of HealthAlliance Hospital Inc. last December went live with parts of the Soarian clinical, financial and health information management suite of Siemens Medical Solutions, Malvern, Pa.
The facilities in Leominster and Fitchburg, Mass., total 143 acute care beds, with 180 active physicians, a medical staff of nearly 400 and about 1,750 users of the new information systems.
Doing a Big Bang go-live wasn't easy, but turning on the modules separately likely would have been tougher, says CIO Richard Mohnk. The hospitals are migrating in three phases from Siemens' legacy Unity information system to the next-generation Soarian.
"We won't have to integrate a new clinical system with the old Unity health information management system, then bring up Soarian financials and have to go through integration again," he adds. "But I'm not going to tell you the go-live was without issues. There are things you never understand until you go live."
The conversion changed virtually every process at the hospitals overnight. More than 400 nurses, for instance, went from paper documentation to electronic at once. But the bottom line, Mohnk says, is that HealthAlliance doesn't regret the simultaneous go-live. "You can literally launch an image and look at a CT exam. There's a lot more capability in the Soarian world than we had before."
On Dec. 1, the hospitals turned on about 60% of Soarian's total module base. That included admissions assessments, nurse assessments, electronic document management...