ABSTRACT
Big complex academic medical center is an integrated delivery network in a highly competitive urban center. With a strategic vision for growth, mergers and acquisitions are a regular part of the business plan. The combination of two large health systems resulted in a seven-hospital system and a vast ambulatory network of practices. This combination into a new even larger and more complex organization also came with a variety of disparate electronic health record (EHR) systems, and registration, scheduling, and hospital admission, discharge, and transfer (ADT) systems. The implementation of the registration and scheduling system changed the workflow of scheduling cases in procedural areas from a centralized process in the admitting office using the hospital ADT system to a decentralized process in the local clinical settings. The goal was to get one step ahead of a future EHR integration by replacing the legacy scheduling system used in the procedural areas, which was separate from the hospital ADT system.
