Background

Anderson Hospital is a 154-bed, 5-star rated, acute care, not-for-profit hospital in Maryville, Illinois serving the communities of Madison and Macoupin counties since 1977. The campus includes a critical access hospital, rehab institute, surgery center, and outpatient acute care facility, all running on the MEDITECH Expanse EHR platform. The hospital sees more than 90,000 patients each year.

Anderson has been an Acmeware Partnership Program client since 2010 and a quality reporting customer since 2013. Over the years, that relationship has expanded to encompass custom reporting, a full Expanse migration, and downtime protection, making Anderson one of Acmeware's most comprehensive client engagements.

Migrating to Expanse: 2,619 Reports, One Trusted Partner

In 2018, Anderson Healthcare committed to upgrading from MEDITECH Client/Server to the Expanse platform. After nearly 20 years on Client/Server, the hospital had built a massive library of NPR and Data Repository SQL reports that would all be affected by the new data architecture. Leadership recognized early that they did not have the internal resources to rewrite that entire report catalog.

Anderson turned to Acmeware. Using OneTrac, Acmeware's proprietary report inventory and project management tool, the team evaluated 2,619 reports and data objects for conversion. During the prioritization process, 152 reports were identified for retirement, with the remainder needing to be rewritten for Expanse.

Acmeware was initially engaged to convert over 1,700 Data Repository SQL stored procedures, while a separate third-party resource was hired to handle the 858 NPR reports. By May 2020, Anderson determined that the other vendor was not meeting expectations and asked Acmeware to take over the remaining NPR conversions as well. Acmeware's deep expertise and extensive existing report catalog allowed them to absorb the additional workload and deliver the complete library of new reports ahead of the Expanse go-live date and on budget.

The entire conversion effort ran from January 2019 through December 2020, spanning nearly two full years of collaborative work between Anderson's IT staff and Acmeware's team.

"While we work with many vendors, Acmeware has come to be a true partner. Since 2013, they've been an integral part of our IS department through their Partnership Program. Their Data Repository expertise has been invaluable." - Michael Ward, Chief of Information Technology, Anderson Hospital

Securing Clinical Continuity with Downtime Defender

With the Expanse migration complete and operations running on the new platform, Anderson turned its attention to another critical need: ensuring that patient data remained accessible during EHR downtime events. As a stroke facility seeing over 90,000 patients annually, the stakes were especially high. A forced patient diversion during a system outage could add 15 minutes to an ambulance transport, potentially delaying the start of life-saving treatment.

"Without access to medical information, it could become very difficult to safely treat the patients, forcing patient diversion, and diversion is something that most hospitals try to avoid. For example, we are a stroke facility, and if we were forced into a diversion, that might add 15 minutes to a patient's ambulance time, potentially delaying start of treatment." - Michael Ward

Anderson became an early participant in Acmeware's Downtime Defender pre-release development program. Downtime Defender is a secure downtime application and report delivery system built specifically for the MEDITECH EHR. It produces regularly scheduled, current-state report snapshots from across the electronic health record, formatted as easy-to-read PDF documents, and securely stores them both locally and in the cloud for guaranteed access during planned or unplanned downtime events.

Key capabilities include:

• Comprehensive clinical reports covering patient summaries, census by location, medication administration records, PCS documentation, lab results, active orders, scheduling, dietary information, HR contacts, and vendor purchase order history
• Multi-destination report delivery to the hospital's data center, cloud storage, and specified on-premises workstations
• HIPAA-compliant security with encrypted reports and optional password protection
• Intranet-based report viewing for easy ad-hoc data review, selectable by facility, location, or patient account
• Built-in monitoring dashboard with report status tracking, data latency monitoring, and automated alerting
• Patient-centric report design optimized with clinician input, combining point-in-time data with future scheduled items to provide a complete view of current and projected patient activity

Results and Benefits

A Smooth, On-Budget Expanse Migration

Acmeware's report conversion work ensured Anderson had a complete, functional report library ready for their Expanse go-live. The ability to absorb the failed third-party vendor's workload mid-project without missing the deadline or exceeding budget demonstrated a level of operational depth and flexibility that Anderson's leadership had come to rely on over years of partnership.

Zero-Maintenance Reliability

Acmeware handles all Downtime Defender updates and system maintenance behind the scenes, requiring no ongoing effort from Anderson's IT staff. The team validates the system daily as a best practice and has never found a lapse in data delivery. The system also includes proactive alerting that would notify staff if data failed to load or if any component encountered a problem. To date, none of those alerts have ever been triggered. In Ward's words, "It just runs smoothly for us."

Intuitive Access Under Pressure

During a downtime event, stress levels are high and there is no time for training. Downtime Defender was designed with that reality in mind. Staff access the system through a simple website login and navigate a familiar folder structure, similar to browsing files in Windows, to find and print the information they need. Ward considers this one of the product's most important qualities: in an emergency that might not occur for years after deployment, the last thing a hospital needs is a tool that requires staff to remember how to use it.

Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery

Anderson Hospital integrated Downtime Defender into a broader disaster recovery strategy designed to maintain data access even if their entire on-premises network is compromised. The hospital maintains spare hard drives and mobile MiFi network cards ready for rapid deployment. In a cyberattack scenario, the team can image clean laptops, replace potentially compromised hard drives, and use the cellular network to access Downtime Defender's cloud-stored patient records, completely independent of the hospital's primary infrastructure.

This layered approach means that even if ransomware encrypts every server on the network, clinicians can still access current medication administration records, active orders, patient schedules, and other mission-critical data through an entirely separate pathway. Ward describes continuity planning as critical for any hospital, noting that Downtime Defender's constant data backup ensures they can access all the components needed to continue serving patients during any type of disruption.

Clinical Continuity and Peace of Mind

The most significant benefit Anderson Hospital gained from Downtime Defender was a fundamental shift in how they approach downtime events. Instead of scrambling to locate patient information during an outage, clinical staff can continue treating patients with confidence while IT focuses on resolving the underlying issue.

"Downtime Defender removes a lot of stress. If something were to happen, we know our clinicians could access the information they need to safely treat patients. We wouldn't be running around in a panic. We could focus on the problem of bringing our systems back up. That provides great peace of mind." - Michael Ward

Ward likens the value of Downtime Defender to having insurance: nobody likes paying for it, until you need it and then you are thankful it is there.

A True Partnership

Anderson Hospital's relationship with Acmeware now spans well over a decade, evolving from Partnership Program support and quality reporting into a full Expanse migration rescue and then into downtime protection. Each engagement deepened the trust between the two organizations, and each new challenge was met with the confidence that comes from years of working together.

"I see Acmeware as a partner and not a vendor. There are very few organizations that I call partner, and that's usually based upon the mutual trust that's developed between the different organizations. Glenn and Greg at Acmeware have gone well out of their way to demonstrate their desire to truly partner with organizations and be an important resource for them, and that's how they've evolved here with Anderson Hospital." - Michael Ward