Success Story

A Single Partner For Your Data Management Strategy

‍Size: Lehigh Valley Health Network (LVHN) is comprised of 13 hospital campuses plus numerous health centers, physician practices, rehabilitation locations, ExpressCARE sites, and other outpatient care locations in 10 Eastern Pennsylvania counties.

Recognition: Lehigh Valley Hospital is ranked 27th in the country for orthopedic care. They have been ranked best regional hospital for 10 years in a row and among the top 10 hospitals in Pennsylvania by U.S. News & World Report.

In 2022, for the third year running, LVHN is one of the top healthcare organizations in the world for adopting and implementing technology to improve patient safety and outcomes. The College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) rated LVHN a Level 10 healthcare organization in the acute and ambulatory categories in its Most Wired Survey for 2022. Only 18 organizations received Level 10 designation.

Challenge

LVHN needed a single, centralized, cloud-based clinical data archive partner to help decommission its disparate, aging technology systems. LVHN acquired four large hospitals/health systems in the region and numerous physician offices, sparking the organization’s need for a data management partner to help develop a strategy to consolidate legacy clinical data. Before finding an archiving partner, LVHN needed to make a significant reduction in its operating expenses related to maintenance and infrastructure costs. Part of this cost reduction plan included implementing a single electronic health record (EHR) system. This created the need to decommission legacy systems and archive patient data. Integration efforts expanded to financial and ERP data, which then prompted the need to quickly find a partner to assist with the data archival and protection process.

Working with ELLKAY

LVHN wanted to consolidate data and eliminate maintenance fees for many of its disparate systems. The healthcare organization selected ELLKAY as its partner to help with a data management strategy to retire and archive many clinical systems using old technology that also represented a major security vulnerability. ELLKAY’s searchable, easy-to-use, web-based dashboards delivered workflow-based views for LVHN’s healthcare data. LVHN uses an enterprise landing page with features allowing the organization to display archives based on user roles and access. With each completed project, LVHN expanded its source systems to archive. Because of this, LVHN’s trust in ELLKAY grew to execute projects effectively and within timelines established.

“ELLKAY has over 20 years of healthcare experience with resources to be the single partner to meet our archiving needs,” said Nik Patel, Director, Technology Development & Support, LVHN. “They provide a single, centralized, cloud-based clinical data archive environment with a searchable, easy-to-use archive and web-based dashboards. Most importantly, ELLKAY has the experience and resource commitments to extract data in complex scenarios.”

The first phase of LVHN’s data management strategy was archiving clinical data. In phase two, the health network began the process of building a financial archive with A/R rundown. LVHN shared insightful feedback with ELLKAY to enhance the financial archive to the robust solution it is today, another reason ELLKAY has continued to be the partner of choice for the health system. ELLKAY took input from LVHN as well as market needs to develop and enhance its financial solution for its partners.

LVHN is in its data strategy’s third phase. This phase is focused on archiving the organization’s ERP legacy data. LVHN did not want multiple vendors for various archive needs and has been pleased with utilizing a single partner with ELLKAY’s solutions. Since the onset of its data strategy program, LVHN has connected more than 100 applications for clinical, financial, and ERP archives with thousands of users accessing the data daily in their EHR.

Results

LVHN partnered with ELLKAY on more than 120 individual projects, consisting of EHR, financial, and ERP archives. ELLKAY completed more than 100 live archives for LVHN. The management of all the projects is carefully coordinated with the teams communicating and collaborating via joint meetings multiple times a week. The results-to-date are over 60% cost savings through decommissioning old technology and cutting recurring maintenance fees drastically for the health system.

“Archiving is a continual effort,” Patel said. “Applications are complex and unique from an archival perspective. It is imperative to work with a partner who understands these complexities and can be a part of your organization’s holistic data management plan. What I like about working with ELLKAY is the openness and willingness to learn and work with us for a mutually agreeable solution. We collaborate to determine the functionality from the clinical to financial and ERP side of data archiving.”