We’ve heard from several health centers that SuccessEHS, the electronic health record we’ve known and (mostly) loved, is being discontinued.

The news was confirmed by a representative from Greenway Health, which owns SuccessEHS, in a comment shared on HIStalk. Organizations that participate in HRSA incentive programs are being encouraged to migrate to a new EHR by September 30th, 2019.

Greenway is hoping that customers will transition to their flagship EHR platform, Intergy. Whether you end up migrating there or somewhere else, our team at Relevant has learned a lot about what makes for a successful data strategy when switching EHRs. Here are some highlights:

  • Independently validate your data migration. Run your own sanity checks—separate from the EHR vendor’s—throughout the data migration process. Are the number of diabetic patients the same in your old and new systems? Are visit types mapped appropriately? Labs? Are custom data elements you've added to SuccessEHS accounted for? Generate random samples of key data points and check them row by row.

  • Keep your SuccessEHS data online. In even the best data migration scenarios, some data gets left behind. So consider keeping a copy of your SuccessEHS database online, for both reporting and emergency clinical purposes. You don’t need to continue running the SuccessEHS application, or continue paying licensing fees, to do so. Even if you don’t have any data warehouse infrastructure in place, this is not hard to do—all you need is a copy of Microsoft SQL Server.

  • Prepare for UDS headaches. Transitioning EHRs mid-year will present challenges for UDS reporting. In the best case, you’ll be able to report all of the 2019 UDS from your new EHR, but in our experience this will involve some complicated queries to account for both native and migrated data. In the more likely case, this will mean combining data from both your old and new EHRs to produce a single UDS report. This is tricky, because it’s important not to overcount patients if they appear in both systems.

  • Keep your trends alive. Whether you’re looking at clinical or operational reports, the ability to see trends over time is what really makes the data useful. We often see years of trending data from an old system disappear when reports are rebuilt against a newly adopted EHR. The best solution is a data warehouse that imports data from both systems and serves as a single source of truth for reporting.

Our team has deep experience with SuccessEHS and its database. Feel free to get in touch if you’d like to talk about data strategy issues during this transition.