Aurora Health Care’s Migration from Cerner to Epic; One of the Largest Archives in the U.S.

Aurora Health Care Case Study

When Aurora Health Care in Wisconsin made a shift in its EMR system from Cerner to Epic, they faced 32 terabytes of legacy records, 75 terabytes of images, 34 million scanned documents and other important items that needed a long-term, secure and accessible home. For perspective, 32 terabytes of storage alone would allow ongoing broadcast quality videos to run continuously for almost two years.

To tackle this extremely large data set, Aurora turned to the archiving experts at Harmony Healthcare IT to develop and implement one of the largest archives of its kind in the country in completing the Cerner to Epic EMR migration.

“We needed a comprehensive solution to address a change in our go-forward EHR system, mountains of legacy data and thousands of concurrent users, with no room for downtime or errors,” said Vince Trier, Director, IT Applications at Aurora Health Care, which operates 15 hospitals, 159 clinic sites and 70 retail pharmacies. “Our archive is an enterprise-wide win that exceeded our expectations. It takes only minutes to learn how to use it and it will provide accessible and secure data storage forever. Best yet, there is significant ROI.”

Managing legacy data is a hot topic for healthcare IT teams as every 18 months, the amount of data in most healthcare systems is multiplying by 100%. Healthcare organizations of all sizes are challenged with how to securely manage and provide access to historical patient data when the complexity of converting it into a new EHR is cost prohibitive.

For the Aurora archive, the Harmony Healthcare IT team analyzed the record retention policy, gathered cross-departmental system requirements and put the right resources in place to comprehensively archive all of the legacy data. The project was completed on time and on budget within 12 months from signature. There were 6,358 active users at the time of transition to the archive. Today, there are about 2,000 named users, 650 of which login concurrently each day.

To learn more about how we can help with your healthcare organization’s Cerner to Epic EMR migration, contact us.

Cerner Millennium is a registered trademark of Cerner Corporation.

Feb 17 2016

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