In spring 2021, Kauniainen’s oral health care services deployed the Apotti system. A prerequisite for successful implementation was data migration from the old Lifecare patient information system. The extraction and harmonisation of data for the migration was carried out using Digia’s migration robot.
Digia Oyj acquired the robotic process automation solution supplier MOST Digital Oy in spring 2022. Read the news about the acquisition.
With approximately 10,000 inhabitants, Kauniainen is a small and cosy garden town just over 15 kilometres from Helsinki. Despite its small size, modern Kauniainen actively develops its services.
In the health and social services reform, social welfare and healthcare services are reformed and responsibility for organising services is transferred from municipalities to entities known as well-being services counties. Digitalisation is an important part of the health and social services reform, as smooth flow of information and knowledge-based decision-making help ensure high-quality care for patients. Until now, municipalities have had varying custom systems in place, so the reform will introduce new and unified patient information systems in the well-being services counties.
In particular, I noticed Digia’s flexibility and ease of cooperation. It even gave the sense of “factory work” in a good way, as it was always clearly stated what is being done, who was doing it and at when.
Tuija Gustavsson, Head of Information Management Development, City of Kauniainen
Need: Get the data from the old Lifecare patient information system into the new Apotti system to be deployed.
Solution: Digia’s migration robot collected and harmonised data from the old system for transfer to the new one.
Benefits: It was possible to direct the specialists’ working hours more efficiently towards core work. In addition, the quality of the data extracted was better when collected by the robot than by a human.
Kauniainen is part of the Helsinki metropolitan area’s well-being services county, where it was decided to introduce Apotti, the world’s first customer and patient information system that combines health and social services. The system provides the patient data needed for the use of health and social care professionals in the county in real time, regardless of the place of treatment.
One of the challenges of the project was to transfer the data of 10,000 patients from the old patient information system to the new one. No ready-made, cost-effective solution could be found for data migration due to the lack of a ready-made tool, and the transfer as human work would have been too slow and difficult. The challenge was overcome with an automated migration robot developed by Digia.
“We heard that in the Central Uusimaa joint municipal authority for healthcare and social services, the municipality of Tuusula was running Apotti migration selections in the Lifecare system with Digia, using robotic process automation”, says Tuija Gustavsson, Development Manager for Information Management in Kauniainen, which prompted them to contact Digia.
The robot was programmed to read the necessary data from the Lifecare system. With the help of a visual data model, the data could be smoothly converted into a format that Apotti required, and the vocabulary used by the systems was also easy to harmonise.
The maintenance of the data selected with Digia’s solution was quick and efficient while Lifecare production was still ongoing. This ensured that the most up-to-date information was transferred to Apotti and there were no downtimes.
In the processing of patient data, information security and data protection are at the heart of everything. For this reason, Digia’s migration robot has been developed as a cloud-controlled hybrid solution, where all data processing takes place in the customer’s own environment, and the entity is controlled through the cloud.
This way, the aim was to ensure that the patient data never left Kauniainen’s customer environment. Finally, the data was transferred through a secure cloud folder to the Apotti system.
Gustavsson says that the processing of sensitive data was first-class. “The aim of everything was to meet the information security and data protection requirements, and no risks were identified during the project. Access to functions and information was restricted between different persons. In addition, the requirements of data protection legislation were met by continuous monitoring of the use of data.”
Maintaining old systems is always expensive and using integration tools often inflexible. Robotic process automation enables a cost-effective way to perform system migrations and data transfer between systems.
Digia offers a productised process and tools for freeing up data from old information systems: the technology can also collect data from systems that have previously only been accessed through heavy human work. With robotic process automation, data can be retrieved regardless of the source, and then converted and exported to any target system, maintaining the consistency and semantic integrity of the data.
Gustavsson is pleased with the progress of the project: “In particular, I noticed Digia’s flexibility and ease of cooperation. It even gave the sense of “factory work” in a good way, as it was always clearly stated what is being done, who was doing it and at when. With much more to bear in mind regarding the introduction of Apotti, we were able to free up thinking capacity for other tasks. So it was easy and safe for us!”
A migration robot enabled safe and cost-effective transfer of patient data from the City of Kauniainen’s old patient information system to a new one.
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