A Successful 6.0 Migration With IPeople Script and IPeople Sync

Benefis Health System, located in Great Falls, Montana is a mission-driven, locally governed community Regional Health System. With a service area covering 44,814 square miles, the 2 campus- 516 bed health system is the largest hospital in the state. Recognized for its exceptional work in quality care, the health system has been distinguished as one of the nation's best hospitals for the past three years running.

Keeping their dedication to excellence in mind, Benefis recently made the decision to move from their MEDITECH Magic 5.61 platform to MEDITECH 6.0 (formerly known as MEDITECH Focus). While they eagerly anticipated the added functionality of the new platform, the IT department positioned itself to maintain the high standards of quality patient care by focusing on a seamless transition.

“When we brought in 6.0 we found that it did not support writing our own scripts in VB Script” explained Doug Worrell, a programmer at Benefis. Early on they discovered that a powerful scripting tool was essential for a smooth migration. “There was a lot of data that was not migrated from Magic to 6.0. Even if MEDITECH converted the data, maybe they didn’t convert it correctly or didn’t bring over a piece of data. There are also additional fields in 6.0 that are not in Magic which MEDITECH populated with default values.”

Doug and his leadership team reached out to several vendors looking for a scripting solution and dictionary synchronization. Ultimately, they partnered with Interface People, because it was the only scripting solution that would work with 6.0 and handle multiple scripting sessions simultaneously. “We brought in IPeople Script which allowed us to pull over the additional data we needed as well as continue all of our day to day tasks and special cases. We easily wrote a ton of scripts to map data into the new 6.0 fields saving us a lot of manual keying effort. The conversion was much easier with IPeople Script. We could go over to Magic, grab data and script it into 6.0.”

Along with migrating their Magic data to the new 6.0 platform, it was essential to keep the dictionaries synchronized during testing. Again, Benefis relied on IPeople to provide a product to meet their needs. “IPeople Sync has saved us a lot of double keying. If you update something in Magic, you don’t need to go to 6.0 and do the same update. We ran the IPeople Sync tool to keep the two in sync which saved us a bunch of time.”

Incorporating the IPeople solutions ensured accuracy in the data, the ability to run multiple script sessions for enhanced productivity, and an automated system for synchronizing dictionaries. The end result was a smooth transition to a new MEDITECH platform for Doug and his team and a continuation of quality excellence for Benefis.

“Using IPeople products and solutions made us much more prepared for 6.0 GoLive. Being able to go out and mass import, change or correct data has had a huge impact on the success of our migration.”
- Doug Worrell, Programmer, Benefis Health System

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