Connecticut Children's Medical Center

Challenge

Modernizing Data Management: Updating Legacy Systems and Integrating with EpicCare

Connecticut Children's Medical Center (CCMC) is a comprehensive pediatric hospital located in Hartford, Connecticut, United States. The hospital provides primary care services to over 15,000 children, emergency care services to 55,000 children, and surgical services to 6,000 children annually. Previously, CCMC relied heavily on manual entry and fax transactions for the daily management of patient records. This manual process proved to be inefficient and potentially prone to inaccuracies, given the hospital's substantial size and operations.

To address these challenges, CCMC embarked on a journey to modernize its data management practices. This involved updating their IT infrastructure to implement EpicCare as their centralized EMR for patient record management. However, this transition presented a new challenge: finding an integration platform capable of not only converting years' worth of manually entered data from legacy records, but also able to seamlessly integrate the new EpicCare EMR with various existing hospital systems.

CCMC's integration team anticipated the need to process tens of thousands of messages on a daily basis, emphasizing the importance of performance and scalability in their selection process. Additionally, compliance with increasingly stringent security requirements at every stage of the hospital's growth was a critical consideration.

​​To ensure the successful integration of the new integration engine with CCMC's operations, the solution had to fulfill the following criteria:

• EMR integration: Easily connect the new central EMR (EpicCare) with multiple hospital systems (i.e. support for a variety of different data formats and transfer protocols).
• Performance: Efficiently handle high volumes of messages processed on a daily basis.
• Scalability: Scale up effectively to accommodate the hospital's ongoing expansion.
• Security: Log encryption and enhanced log auditing capabilities to meet rigorous security compliance requirements.

Solution

Using Iguana to connect EpicCare EMR to key hospital systems

To overcome their challenges, CCMC implemented the Iguana integration engine with the support of iNTERFACEWARE’s professional services. Leveraging Iguana, the hospital's integration team was able to shift away from manual processes to automated ones, radically transforming the way data is integrated across all major departments.

Before starting the integration process, Iguana was also instrumental in converting millions of records from legacy systems to the EpicCare EMR. This encompassed a variety of patient information, including hospital encounters, transcription data, radiology data, and vaccination information.

Upon successful conversion, CCMC utilized Iguana to establish several bi-directional interfaces between all their key hospital systems. These interfaces, deployed in VMware environments, primarily facilitated the transmission and reception of patient data in the form of HL7. Collectively, they integrate EpicCare EMR with vital areas of the hospital, including labs, billing, radiology, pharmacy, cardiology, audiology, transcriptions, devices, and more. Using Iguana, CCMC successfully established hundreds of channels that support seamless data exchange not only within their internal hospital systems, but with external vendors as well.

CCMC's EpicCare EMR Integrations 

Beyond Integration: Troubleshooting and Monitoring Hospital Interfaces

In addition to these integration capabilities, CCMC benefited from enhanced troubleshooting and monitoring features provided by Iguana. The integration engine provided comprehensive logging, auditing, and analysis functions, enabling the IT team to easily track data flows and swiftly resolve any issues or discrepancies. Real-time alerts and notifications facilitated proactive monitoring, ensuring prompt responses to potential problems and maintaining smooth operations. 

With Iguana, CCMC gained enhanced visibility, control, and optimization of their integrated systems, ensuring superior data accuracy and reliability.

Results

Achieved Outcomes and Benefits

CCMC has been an iNTERFACEWARE customer for over 18 years, leveraging the Iguana integration engine to address their data integration challenges. Iguana serves as the hospital's primary integration engine, facilitating seamless data exchange between 12 essential hospital systems and the EpicCare EMR application.

The implementation of Iguana has yielded significant results, including:

With over 100 interfaces deployed within VMware environments, Iguana has enabled CCMC to easily scale and meet increasingly rigorous security compliance requirements during each stage of their organizational expansion.

Patient data is now easily accessible across all hospital systems, as manual data entry and fax transactions have been eliminated. To date, over one million records, including hospital encounters, transcription data, radiology data, and vaccination information, have been successfully converted. This modernization of data integration practices has allowed physicians to focus on providing quality patient care rather than spending time on data entry, leading to more accurate and timely point-of-care decisions.

CCMC's long-standing partnership with iNTERFACEWARE and successful adoption of Iguana as their integration engine have significantly improved data integration, streamlined operations, and enhanced the quality of care.