King’s Daughters Medical Center (KDMC) in Mississippi has announced the successful implementation of HealthStore®, an independent clinical data repository (CDR) by BridgeHead Software. This project involved the decommissioning of the hospital’s legacy Electronic Health Record (EHR) system and the migration of over two decades of patient data.
KDMC, a 60-bed facility serving a five-county region, partnered with BridgeHead Software, renowned experts in healthcare application retirement, to lead this initiative.
The decommissioning of KDMC’s legacy EHR system, MEDITECH Magic, resulted in the migration of nearly 700,000 patient records to HealthStore during the six-month implementation program. HealthStore serves as a unified repository for patient data, consolidating, storing, and safeguarding it. This enables clinicians to access and retrieve patient information seamlessly at the point of care.
Kevin Kimble, Data Systems Specialist at KDMC, expressed confidence in BridgeHead’s expertise, stating, “We wanted to work with a team with concrete experience in retiring legacy data applications. BridgeHead provides peace of mind, not only knowing that you can show and teach staff how to use HealthStore and feel confident that they will pick it up easily, but the reassurance that everything they need is at their fingertips. I also wanted to ensure the protection of the legacy EHR data and felt very comfortable with the security capabilities that HealthStore provides,”
Continuing to operate legacy systems can be resource-intensive and costly for healthcare organisations. Legacy solutions also become more susceptible to security risks and cyberattacks over time. Transitioning to HealthStore has resulted in comprehensive data protection and cost savings, encompassing manpower for system maintenance, licensing, server hosting, power consumption, cooling, and more. By retiring the MEDITECH MAGIC system, KDMC was able to decommission all associated equipment previously used for the legacy EHR.
Moreover, HealthStore has streamlined workflow practices, allowing both clinical and non-clinical staff to securely access historical and current data with ease. The platform’s intuitive timeline functionality provides a comprehensive view of a patient’s history, displaying the number of corresponding documents by month and year, whether clinical, financial, or administrative.
Jim Beagle, President and CEO at BridgeHead Software, commended KDMC’s effective application retirement project, stating, “When healthcare organisations recognise their legacy EHR systems are no longer delivering sufficient value to justify their continued support and maintenance, it’s time to explore how best to decommission those applications – and KDMC is a prime example of how to embark on an effective application retirement project. Not only has KDMC saved precious time and money on supporting an out-of-date system, it has provided the workforce with the right tools to access valuable legacy data quickly, easily, and securely, to ultimately support improved patient care.”
