Manifest MedEx, the largest nonprofit health information exchange (HIE) in California, faced a daunting challenge: a full system migration with a tight timeline. They were optimizing their HealthShare instance and reducing spend by migrating to an InterSystems-hosted environment. Their migration was especially complex because they needed to both evolve and advance while supporting their legacy systems, requiring them to maintain two separate tracking branches in vastly different technologies for code and configuration. This multifaceted migration involved approximately 24 mini-projects, amounting to almost 20,000 hours of labor. The deadline was strict and the stakes were high.
Traditionally, such migrations are manual, labor-intensive efforts, involving extensive copying and pasting of code from one environment to another, then adjudicating code to fit the new environment. However, this time, they had a powerful tool at their disposal: the Settings Framework developed by J2 Interactive.
The Settings Framework was a game-changer for the project. It eliminated the need for manual copying and pasting, which not only saved an estimated three months of labor but also significantly reduced the risk of human error and old, unused code being transferred. This tool allowed the team to start on the migration project immediately, even before the new environment was fully ready. Its ability to extract and enable efficient comparison of source control repositories meant that developers could easily identify and move only what was necessary to the new environment, ensuring a smooth transition.
Settings Framework enabled the creation of settings and production configurations in the old environment and facilitated a bulk upload to the new environment. This streamlined approach was crucial in mitigating the inherent risks associated with such a large-scale migration.
InterSystems HIE Solutions Program Manager, Jim Powers, noted that “Settings Framework was a critical piece of our migration of a major customer to our hosted solutions, allowing our teams to propagate existing settings from the legacy environment out to the customer’s new IRIS For Health and HealthShare Managed Solution instances, and is integral to our ongoing operations supporting our HSMS Customers. Settings Framework is one of the major reasons why our last migration went live on time and on budget. It allows us to serialize large sets of settings and customizations quickly and consistently between environments and installs, and it integrates well with our existing code management solution.”
The impact of the Settings Framework on the project was significant. Not only did it bring the project to completion on time and under budget, but it also resulted in a remarkably smooth go-live phase. Brian Lamprecht, one of the migration project leads, reflected, “I’ve never before been involved with a project of this scale that was so quiet at the end, with almost nothing to fix after the go-live.”
Without the Settings Framework, the project would have required an additional estimated 2,000 hours of work, likely causing Manifest MedEx to miss their critical deadline and incur significant financial penalties. Thanks to this innovative tool, the migration was not only successful but also set a new standard for efficiency and effectiveness in large-scale IT projects within the healthcare sector.
