From Transaction to Transformation:

A Tech Migration

After an extensive, 6-month-long technical, management, and executive evaluation process, our leadership and governance teams have collectively arrived at the Integrated Technology Environment, providing our network better technology with less complexity that’s positioned to take advantage of HL7® FHIR® (future technological) transformations.

F.A.Q.

Migration is a complex process. To mitigate impacts and risks, we will be using the following guiding principles:

  • Commitment to constant communication and transparency
  • Designing for optimal, least stakeholder/client disruptive processes
  • Providing opportunities for early adopters to pilot and kick the tires. 
  • Understanding the best ways/means/time to deploy from our clients’ unique perspectives
  • Lining up with stakeholders’ Smart on FHIR strategy
Why is MiHIN launching a technological environment migration?

    • Improve data quality
    • Modernize infrastructure and eliminate duplicative legacy systems by ensuring consolidation of technologies
    • Increase reliability and responsiveness of scaling services
    • Create the path for required FHIR transformations
    • Bridge existing payer and future provider FHIR environments
    • Provide a cloud native environment that’s optimized, faster, higher performing, and has the highest levels of modern security
    • Keeping all current environments running is inefficient, not cost-optimized, and has diminished our ability to be truly responsive to customer needs.
What is changing?

We are making the slow, steady migration away from the legacy environments that support some of our current solutions.

While most core functionality will remain, we will be conducting a gaps analysis to understand what we are offering our stakeholders and customers today vs the equivalent functionality we’re expecting to be able to offer with our new environment.  Analysis and findings will be communicated and discussed ongoing.

When is this happening?

We are engaging in a slow and steady migration over the next 18-24 months. Phase 1 is currently underway. The goal is for phase 1 to be complete by the early January 2023.

What should we expect?

Trainings and change management will be offered as we work to implement.

Analysis and findings will be communicated and discussed ongoing.

 

 

Contact Us

About Phase 1

Customer feeds will flow directly into the new Integrated Technology Environment and back out to the customer’s historical Rhapsody or Health Connect interfaces.

Clients will send to the same connection point they’ve always had, and they will continue to receive data from the same interface engine that they always have. 

No VPN or Firewall changes will be required by customers, only the ACK message that you receive will be different.  

We are simply catching the data in the firewall and rerouting it to the Integrated Technology Environment.

 

9

How does phase 1 work? 

  • Customers who send data will receive a different type of ACK (an acknowledgement message) when sending data.
  • In the new type of ACK from the Integrated Technology Environment, the AA portion is still there and it’s still in the same spot.
  • The Integrated Technology Environment  is adding MSA 4, which is an internal unique identifier that MiHIN uses to track a message throughout the process.
9

What is a test feed? 

When a customer initially goes live with a use case, before they start sending real patient data, we set up the interface and establish an active test feed. This enables us to make sure everything is working correctly before we move the customer into production with real patient data.

For many of our clients, the test feed stops getting used after initial testing during onboarding. 

9

Mitigating possible downtime

To mitigate the chance downtime happening at wide scale, we are validating our migration procedure (i.e. making sure all of this works) by beginning with a test feed (i.e. using synthetic patient data to test whether the environment is working. )

9

Next steps 

MiHIN sets up a cut-over date(s)—this means we will move your production feeds (i.e., the REAL data, not test data) so the data flows to the new environment and then back out to Health Connect or Rhapsody.

Again, we are not changing the connection point (how you send us data) OR the receiving point (where you get data from).  

The only expected change at this point is a different type of ACK (an acknowledgement message) will be received when sending data to MiHIN.