We were on PM 2004 (MS SQL) and EMR 5.6 (Oracle). We started the migration to CPS 10 at the end of 2011. We first upgraded our PM 2004 to CPS 10 since this was the easiest of the two. After getting the bugs worked out of the PM upgrade to CPS 10 we migrated our Oracle emr to CPS 10. This was a difficult process and we had a lot of issues for several months. I understand that the migration is a little better now but still a bear.
I think that one of the biggest issues with the clinical staff and physicians is in CPS the chart update opens in a separate window which means a lot of the buttons and tabs you're use to seeing in front of you in the oracle version have now been pushed to the back and out of sight. This was such an issue, causing many more clicks that I created an encounter form called buttons that contains action buttons for tasks used during a visit.
We also ran into a couple of issues where there were left overs in the database. For example after migrating to CPS 10 printing any form that was crystal report based took no less than 30 seconds to print. This means scripts, orders, etc. were taking much longer to print than we were used to. Several GE engineers looked at the problem and couldn't find the issue for a few months and then checked a table one day in the db they hadn't checked before and there it was an entry still pointing to our old oracle server.
Once GE released SP3 for CPS10 alot of our issues were resolved.
I made sure we had an engineer assigned to us after the migration and I would suggest to press for that.
One thing I wish I had done was get the physicians to spend more time in our test environment before the go live. If I had done that I would have been able to better anticipate the issues that came up from the chart update being in a separate window. It didn't seem like a big deal until they started using it to see patients.
I don't regret the decision to migrate. It was and no doubt still is a painful process. It is very nice to have one database and one application that has all your patients data in it. It is one less application for the users to login into and they like that. It is also much easier to develop reports that need both PM and clinical data. For example we had a report developed that helps us identify patients on the upcoming day's schedule that are eligible for their medicare wellness visit. CPS has it's pros and cons just like any other application. I would say probably the biggest con is the chart module performs slower. Feel free to ask me more about our migration if you would like I've left things out like going to a vm environment out. Also we just upgraded to CPS 12 2 weeks ago.
Justin
Posted : May 13, 2014 8:04 am
