Transforming Healthcare Together

Engagement Period February 2015 - April 2016

The Challenge

Cloud21 were asked to assist with a high-pressure project to merge data from a legacy version of Cerner Millennium PAS at Barnet and Chase Farm Hospitals (BCF) into the instance used by the Royal Free Hospital (RFH) following the merge of the hospitals into a single Trust.

The migration scope was for all future activity and 2 years’ historic activity to be migrated. There were very strict time constraints, as RFH were contractually obliged to move their data out of the BT data centre by the end of Sept 2015, although this was subsequently extended to the end of October.

Once the migration work had started, Cloud21 were further tasked with leading the Informatics and Reporting team in validating and verify the migrated data against that held within the Trust’s data warehouse.

The Trust was keen to ensure that all BCF data would remain available for reference following the decommissioning of the legacy system.

The IDS: View module was commissioned from Cloud21 to achieve this requirement.

The Approach

The Cloud21 team used the IDS data migration module to map existing data sources to the data migration scope. Bespoke CCL queries were generated to directly pull key data from Millennium where items were required for migration but not available through the standard daily extracts. Cloud21 provided a high level of support to the Cerner system build process and emulated many of the Cerner pre-load validation checks within the IDS to validate migrated data ahead of each trial load.

A key feature of this project was to identify and merge patients with records in both systems into a single record within the RFH instance. Cloud21 used its IDS Patient Merge module to agree with the Trust the criteria for automatically merging patients and to highlight potential matches requiring manual checking.

As an additional complexity, the PAS systems used overlapping number ranges for their patient identifiers.

This meant that patients added to the RFH instance needed to be allocated a new distinct identifier as part of the migration process. Cloud21 worked with the Trust to agree a new identifier numbering system, and to include the old BCF number as a legacy identifier within the migrated data so that patients could still be searched for and found.

This work ensured that every patient migrated from legacy systems (approx. 2m records) had a unique identifier, that any given identifier only referred to one patient, and that all patients were migrated to the RFH system.

With Cloud21 leading on Informatics and Reporting validation, data could be quickly compared across the IDS source data feeds, migration files (IFFs) and Trust data warehouse. The Cloud21 lead planned and delivered a mechanism for updating identifiers within the Trust warehouse to ensure continuity of central reporting following the merge. The Informatics and Reporting lead worked closely with the Cloud21 data migration and Trust testing teams to deliver robust bulk data comparisons and testing of SUS CDS extracts for migrated records.

How did our work deliver value to the Client?

The team successfully implemented a data migration programme within the tight timescales. The delivery of the project was aided by Cloud21’s extensive understanding of the processes leading to data migration, the generation of IFFs, and their analysis and resolution of issues that arose during migration.

The team performed a successful migration of all future OP appointments and RTT Pathways, from two instances of Cerner into one, enabling the Trust to have confidence in the data held in the combined Cerner instance following go-live.

The IDS View module was successfully deployed to provide simple access for users to legacy data from the Barnet and Chase Farm instance that was not part of the migration scope.

Using the in-depth data and reporting knowledge in the team, Cloud21 facilitated effective communications between the workstreams during the Project, and ensured that the Informatics and Reporting team were able to produce reports from the merged data immediately after the migration.