War Memorial, Sault Ste. Marie, MI

May 14, 2015: Sandy DePlonty, Sr. Director of Clinical Srvs, IS, IT, LAB, Reimbursement & Cindy Dodds HIM Director, Privacy Officer

Sandy DePlonty and Cindy Dodds, team leaders for the Valco replacement project, are working with Jennifer Ware, IS Specialist, and Tina King, IT, staff members crucial to success of the project, to extract critical Valco data images and house them in a new system.

War Memorial Hospital (WMH), like many other healthcare organizations, stores images in a system called Valco. Valco was purchased by Hyland and the support for the Valco product is no longer available to its customers. Hospitals must have access to these images which include clinical, business office, HR, invoicing, and other important images necessary for daily business and patient care.

Sandy DePlonty reflects, “What got us into this project initially, we purchased Valco and within the first year of implementation we were told we would have to convert before the implementation was completed. We had good service with Valco, but not so much from Hyland. Service was down to one or two people from Hyland and it was iffy at best.

We had to make a decision. We got the quote for OnBase, the replacement product from Hyland for Valco, and they gave us a timeframe to convert. With OnBase there were some features we did not like, for example, the doctors would have to go sign everything outside of the system, which is not what they’re used to.

We looked at other products, but none of them had all the functionality in one place that we were looking for. MEDITECH said we had to go with them and convert to their clinical system, but the scanning and archiving they offer was way out of reach cost-wise for us. We simply did not have the funding for it.”

Cindy Dodds shares, “We began speaking with The HCISolution, Inc. We sent them the specifications for the project and they confirmed it could be done. The sales and programming staff there seemed like they wanted to help us and partner with us. One of the main reasons we decided to go with The HCISolution is because they said they would give us all the functionality we wanted. We liked the clinical and business functions, and frankly we were surprised when they told us the clinical could be done as well. “

WMH purchased Valco Data Extraction and Conversion Services from The HCISolution, Inc. to remove the scanned images from Valco and PaperStore Archiving and Imaging for Clinical and Business Office, offered by Delta Systems, Inc., a vendor partner of The HCISolution, Inc. to replace Valco completely. The HCISolution and Delta Systems work in tandem to provide the complete products and services known as Valco Data Extract and PaperStore. WMH did opt for additional modules and workflows to enhance their PaperStore product and streamline services: Contract Management Module, Invoices Workflow and Correspondence Tracking Workflow.

Sandy says, “I recommend to anybody that has Valco to go with The HCISolution, Inc., whether moving to MEDITECH 6.x or not. It was a no brainer and a great partnership!

When we were about to GO LIVE we discovered there was a difference in the viewer and the process for the end users was totally different in PCI/Clinical Review. We were impressed when The HCISolution programmers decided to start from scratch and rework the entire project to deliver exactly what we wanted and give us what we were used to. We are talking about tremendous changes right before GO LIVE and they were willing to change everything and redo it.

WMH has over 500 end users, including 150 nurses and other clinical staff and business office staff that have access to scanned images. As far as the end user experience, it was seamless, although, we would have hoped to train in TEST, we did have to train in LIVE due to time constraints. We didn’t even tell the physicians. We were given the same functionality very fast and we did not have to worry about going to another platform. We are able to keep everything we need and have it for the future even though we are not ready for 6x.”

Cindy further explains, “When it comes to support, anytime we sent an email or called for help we were answered quickly. Ken and Steve (Ken Hoffman of The HCISolution and Steve Millard of Delta Systems – programmers) would be right there on the phone directly assisting the end users with any issues including the little issues like scanning processes. Any other items we needed were handled in an organized manner. All the right people we needed were included in meetings and topics were addressed quickly, for example, when we encountered some slowness in the system and the size of files needed to be adjusted, HCI and Delta jumped in with changes to make our lives easier.”

Sandy talks about what’s next for WMH, “We are still adding some areas, for example, AP, and soon we will be moving contracts over to the PaperStore Contract Management Module. We will be connecting the employee education piece to HR and all physician records will be scanned for documentation for the report card requirements.”

For Sandy, “The biggest benefit was not having to convert to Hyland. Having the stress of that off our backs was a huge relief.” Cindy agrees and adds that for her, “The biggest benefit was having minimum change for the end user in viewing ability and to be able to go back to MEDITECH and say that we did it without having to purchase their product.”