Triumph During Challenge: Revamping NYC Health and Hospitals’ Credentialing Platform Amidst Pandemic
AlphaRidge partnered with NYC Health and Hospitals, the largest municipal healthcare system in the United States, to modernize their outdated credentialing system.
This project successfully improved the daily functions of 42,000 employees and impacted over 1 million patients, by overcoming staffing shortages while managing the ongoing COVID pandemic.
As part of a Health and Human Services (HHS) initiative, NYC Health and Hospitals was enabled to modernize and secure their legacy healthcare systems. The decade-old credentialing platform had become a critical bottleneck during the COVID pandemic, severely impacting patient care. AlphaRidge took the challenge head-on, leading data extraction, mapping, QA testing, and training technologists and providers.
The Challenge: Coordinating During Crisis
Undertaking a platform migration amidst the pandemic presented numerous obstacles. AlphaRidge had to create a dedicated Project Management Office (PMO) with stakeholders from the hospital's security, IT, and administrative leadership to manage dependencies and timelines effectively. Staffing gaps in informatics and infrastructure teams were exacerbated due to the COVID pandemic, requiring AlphaRidge to take over key technical and clinical analyst functions to ensure project continuity. To further complicate the project, the legacy credentialing platform lacked documentation and functionality to export clean and useful data.
CHALLENGES AT A GLANCE
+ Critical system migration in the middle of a pandemic.
+ Short staffed hospital technology and informatics teams.
+ Incomplete documentation, and data gaps from legacy platform.
+ Maintaining rapid QA schedule against aggressive go-live date.
"AlphaRidge was a key partner in our work to modernize our credentialing system, city-wide. The effort and collaboration shown on the project is deeply appreciated by the H+H team."
Jenny Lin CPMSM, PMP, RN, MBA | Director of City-Wide Credentialing
Our Approach
AlphaRidge tackled the lack of a data schema and hygiene in the legacy platform by cleaning up and validating all procedure codes, qualifications, and requirements for both physicians and healthcare facilities. The team worked with a development environment, conducting weekly sprints to address deviations, application issues, and documentation challenges before moving to production.
Implementation
AlphaRidge joined forces with MD Staff, a modern credentialing vendor solution, to replace the legacy system. The new platform’s responsive interface, load balancing for performance management, and noSQL database significantly increased system speed for over 12,000 providers, who had to meet departmental permissions based on the number of procedures performed.
The Results
The successful migration led to a reduction in credentialing processing time and manual data entry. Real-time data integration enabled better synchronization between systems, eliminating the need for manual imports that previously crippled the legacy credentialing platform. The project met the January 1st go-live deadline despite facing numerous challenges and staffing shortages.
Impact
+ New York City Health & Hospitals (NYC H+H) is the largest public healthcare system in the United States.
+ They serve more than one million New Yorkers annually across its 11 acute care hospitals, five long-term care facilities, and more than 70 community-based clinics and primary care sites.
+ The system employs more than 42,000 people, including physicians, nurses, therapists, and other healthcare professionals.
Conclusion
This engagement highlights the importance of data hygiene, efficient project management, and collaboration with healthcare professionals in successfully modernizing a critical healthcare system. AlphaRidge's support, resources, and expertise enabled NYC Health and Hospitals to overcome extreme staffing shortages and pandemic-related challenges while implementing a responsive, efficient credentialing platform. This project demonstrated the potential for rapid modernization in the healthcare sector and the value of a dedicated team of experts in overcoming unprecedented obstacles.
