PROVIDENCE, RI – At Care New England, the silos have been falling like dominoes. So far, 12 are down with two to go.
These particular silos were especially confining because they contain archival information that has been largely irretrievable due to long-obsolete parochial formats. As a result, valuable historical data sat in cobwebbed crypts with no means of finding daylight.
“Many of these applications were in proprietary formats that we no longer support or even have the means to maintain,” said CIO Bruce Reirden.
“The biggest issue was that the applications had gotten so old that the companies we bought software from had either been sold to another company or went out of business.”
Not only are healthcare organizations required to have access to historical records in case of drug or medical equipment recalls, but medical students also must venture into old records during the course of their research. “We needed an inexpensive way to extract the data – something that gave us the capability to translate it into a standardized format,” Reirden said. “Pervasive gave us the tool we needed.”
Mike Hoskins, chief technology officer for Austin, Texas-based Pervasive Software, says his company is seeing an increasing number of situations like the one at Care New England.
“The massive heterogeneous world of diverse legacy systems is creating a nasty IT problem,” he said. “These systems typically go back 30 years, operate in little silos and don’t talk to each other. Allowing data to flow back and forth is a huge challenge.”
The situation is especially thorny at integrated delivery networks, because as they consolidate into one organization, they bring together a lot of old computer hardware running on archaic platforms.
Pervasive’s Business Integrator is a conduit that uses a series of connectors to translate files and records from these disparate systems into a standardized format, whether it’s HIPAA, HL7 or in Care New England’s case, Microsoft SQL.
Reirden figures it will take another few months to drill through the remaining two legacy silos before the data can be accessed from one source. Then the IT team will embark on the second of a three-stage process that will end with the creation of a “full-blown data warehouse,” he said.
