CHRISTUS Health Reduces System Down Time with Manta for EHR System Upgrades

“Once we’ve been notified of the upgrades in our non-production environments, we run a scan through Manta to see if there will be any downstream impacts. If there will be, we send them to our developers to make changes before those impacts affect our end users.” - Jonathan Beverly, Information Technology Engineer Senior Information Services at CHRISTUS Health

The Challenge

CHRISTUS Health is a nonprofit health system made up of more than 600 centers, including hospitals, clinics and urgent care centers. CHRISTUS Health faced two major challenges with its data system: 

• Managing the impact of EHR system updates across data sets. 
• Getting ahead of users in identifying and resolving data issues. 

During required quarterly electronic health records (EHR) system upgrades, CHRISTUS Health was experiencing major downstream impacts and system outages. More specifically, EHR system upgrades led to data problems including new and deprecated columns, which resulted in downstream impacts affecting end users. 

Without visibility into how required upgrades would affect their data environment, the CHRISTUS team was forced to take a reactive rather than a proactive approach to impacts. Rather than CHRISTUS flagging potential impacts in advance and addressing them before they posed problems, end users would inform them of outages as they occurred. Then, CHRISTUS engineers needed to backtrack and troubleshoot what had already gone wrong.  

“It was decreasing the workload of things that we should have been working on, and we were backtracking and fixing problems that should have been taken care of a long time ago,” explained Jonathan Beverly, Information Technology Engineer Senior Information Services at CHRISTUS Health. “What could have taken minutes, we were now spending weeks, days, and hours addressing.”

The team at CHRISTUS Health was frustrated that end users were discovering and reporting problems before their team was aware of an issue. And as the company evolved into a larger healthcare system, it faced migration challenges and data deprecation. Fixes took longer than they should have because the team needed more visibility into its full data environment. 

Additionally, CHRISTUS was conducting an EHR migration away from an outdated EHR reporting application system. To effectively migrate their existing reports away from the legacy application, they needed a well-documented data environment. But with massive amounts of health data in disparate systems and databases, which was made worse by numerous acquisitions of other entities, it was challenging to make sense of the flow of their data.

The Plan

CHRISTUS Health recognized the need for a data lineage solution to help identify downstream impacts that the required quarterly EHR upgrades would have on their systems. They also needed a data lineage vendor that could help them with their migration effort, which included moving hundreds of custom reports to a new EHR system.

Additionally, CHRISTUS Health needed a data lineage vendor that offered integrations with Tableau, SSRS, and SSIS – a crucial element in their reporting protocols. With a clear vision in mind, they evaluated data lineage vendors to determine the best fit. 

“We already had certain things that we felt were must-haves to move forward with any data lineage solution, and based on demos, discussions, and what we were able to see early on in the process, we truly felt that Manta would be able to fulfill that,” said Beverly.

CHRISTUS Health evaluated a variety of data lineage vendors. Although many of Manta’s competitors offered integrations with Tableau, SSRS, and SSIS for reporting, none provided the level of detail that met their needs. During the evaluation process, the CHRISTUS team was impressed with the column-level lineage that Manta was able to provide to identify downstream impacts. The CHRISTUS team also felt that Manta’s lineage for Tableau, SSRS, and SSIS were superior with reporting technologies and integrations, and because these were must-haves, Manta stood out against the competition. 

The Outcome 

After implementing Manta over the course of three to four weeks, CHRISTUS created a new workflow that proactively approached EHR upgrades through Mantas impact analysis and revision comparison capabilities.  

“Once we’ve been notified of the upgrades in our non-production environments, we run a scan through Manta to see if there will be any downstream impacts. If there will be, we send them to our developers to make changes before those impacts affect our end users,” added Beverly.

By incorporating automated data lineage, CHRISTUS Health could scan key parts of its data environment to identify EHR system changes and create proactive quarterly updates. Insights that once required days of tedious work — leaving the team in a constant reactive mode — took minutes or hours after implementing lineage tools. 

The end result is significantly reduced downtime and a high level of service-level agreement (SLA) for system uptime.  

With the workflow now in place, CHRISTUS is determining other ways that Manta can help solve data challenges. Notably, they have plans to expand on their usage of Manta to include a reporting mechanism that analyzes their most used assets from existing reports to intelligently identify redundancies that can be consolidated. 

To learn more about how Manta can help your organization achieve proactive change management, request a demo today.