Roadblock ahead
North County Women’s Specialists (NCWS) is a comprehensive women’s health organization that provides care to women (and families) in Escondido, CA, and the surrounding areas. For more than 50 years, women have trusted NCWS with their gynecological, prenatal and fertility care.
In 2018, NCWS leadership was forced to make the decision to migrate from its preferred electronic health record (EHR) system to a new platform. As the change took place, users noticed a distinct and unnerving problem: All the patient data wasn’t mapping correctly. More specifically, the patient data that was to be migrated from the previous EHR system was not populating in the correct fields within the new EHR. The time it would take to manually port over the information—for thousands of patients, for as far back as possible—was almost incalculable. The new system wasn’t accepting Allergies, Histories, etc., correctly. Instead, all that critical information was funneling into the Problems field of the patients’ EHRs.
To deliver excellent patient care—especially this type of specialized patient care—all this important information needs to be front and center and easy to access. And until that was achieved, NCWS was faced with a heavy challenge—how could the team efficiently and effectively get all that patient data into the new system, in the right places, as quickly as possible?
Altera Managed Services delivers resources, guidance and system expertise to refine the migration
Altera Managed Services stepped in and the associates assigned to this case made it their priority to help. Through quick communication and a dedication to providing results, the Altera associates relied on their expertise to migrate 15 years of complete records—seamlessly and in a shorter timeframe than what was initially expected. When asked about the impact of the migration, Tamy Tvedten, Sr. Applications Program Manager, stated, “I can’t believe how much this helped our organization. [Altera Managed Services] was able to provide two full loads of clinical items, scanned documents and three delta loads for about 50,000 patients and 2.3M images and scanned documents. We could have been mapping all of this data for literal years.”
This transition was smooth, and Tvedten credits the help of Altera Managed Services. She continued, “I cannot say enough about [Altera Managed Services] and the great job they did. They were always accommodating to our schedules and delivered the details in a timely matter. We could always count on them to respond to emails quickly and hop on calls when needed. The Altera team has been a pleasure to work with.”
We needed to remain focused on ensuring we had the right information when and where the doctors and nurses needed it. It could have been much more stressful, but, thankfully, it wasn’t.
Tamy Tvedten
Sr. Applications Program Manager
As serving the community is its top priority, NCWS was able to maintain continuity of care and a firm focus on the patient experience while Altera Managed Services provided the resources and expertise needed to ensure a painless data migration. Without this help, NCWS staff members would’ve had to manually sort through years of data, which would have halted the essential care to the women and families had received for decades.
“On the most basic level,” Tamy said, “the Altera team helped us avoid the administrative headaches that were surely to come from this migration problem. We needed to remain focused on ensuring we had the right information when and where the doctors and nurses needed it. It could have been much more stressful, but, thankfully, it wasn’t.”
This partnership held patient care to a high standard while Altera diligently worked in the background to keep NCWS running smoothly. The path forward was once filled with data roadblocks, but now is clear as the organization sets its sights on taking its care to the next level.
