Rochester General Relies on MOVEit to Transfer Medical Records and Meet HIPAA/HITECH Compliance

MOVEit provides centralized visibility and control for the hospital’s IT staff.

The Challenge

Rochester General Hospital (RGH) is a 528-bed tertiary-care facility serving Greater Rochester, NY and beyond with a full array of medical services. The hospital is a major healthcare provider for upstate New York, with over 32,000 inpatient discharges, 100,000 emergency room visits and 1.1 million outpatient encounters annually.

Rochester General’s billing department needs to exchange patient records and claims information with dozens of insurance companies, health plan providers and other payer organizations so the hospital can get paid for its services.

The Vision

Rochester General must ensure information flows smoothly and securely between its internal servers and applications running on a wide variety of third-party systems. It needs to exchange patient records and billing information with many health plan providers, insurance companies and other payer organizations. These transfers need to be both reliable and easy to track so files don’t go missing and delay or prevent payment. They also need to be highly secure to protect patient privacy and ensure compliance with HIPAA and other regulations.

The Solution

MOVEit Managed File Transfer provides centralized visibility and control for the hospital’s IT staff who work behind the scenes to set up connections with payer organizations and manage the transfers. “We needed to consolidate on a standard way to transfer files to many different payer systems, and MOVEit has been a great resource for us,” says Dylan Taft, Systems Engineer at Rochester General Hospital.

Dylan has taken advantage of MOVEit’s point and click simplicity to set up, manage and track more than 70 different file transfer operations between hospital servers and the systems used by payers and outside healthcare providers. “We use MOVEit to transmit many different types of files: claims and remits, patient records from our electronic medical system, reports our systems generate for outside physician practices, and other files. We’re easily sending eight or nine hundred files a day, so there’s a lot of traffic going through this.”

Using MOVEit, Rochester General has been able to consolidate file transfers between a variety of applications, hardware platforms and operating systems. MOVEit uploads files from these hospital servers, encrypts them and delivers them to third-party systems. Examples include ClaimLogic and SSI ClickON billing systems, Medicare/Medicaid payment systems, EMR systems from McKesson and EpicCare, practice management systems used by outside physicians, and many others.

File transfer results at a glance

One of Dylan’s favorite features is the status window that tracks all file transfer activity and results on one screen. “MOVEit has allowed us to centralize all those processes in one location and streamline the support we provide for our internal clients. In the past, we’d have to look through log files to determine if transfers went through, which could take hours or days. MOVEit makes troubleshooting very easy and allows us to be proactive.”

Audit trail at their fingertips

Safeguarding patient privacy is always a priority at Rochester General, and another benefit of MOVEit is the ability to transfer patient information securely—and be able to prove it. MOVEit complies with HIPAA and HITECH regulations for secure transfer of confidential patient information and preserves a complete audit trail of all file transfer activity in its database. “Without MOVEit, we wouldn’t have that visibility. MOVEit is the tool that provides it for us," said Dylan.

Saving time and money daily

“We were using numerous batch files to transfer files back and forth to third parties,” Dylan explains. “There was no standard, troubleshooting was difficult, and we had no alerting if file transfers failed. Sometimes processes would die and we wouldn’t know for days if claims or funds were missing. Now if there’s an issue, we know about it immediately and can act on it.” Dylan adds that lack of visibility into file transfers would have also overwhelmed the hospital’s busy IT staff. “If we didn’t have MOVEit, we probably would have to hire one or two additional people just to review log files every day—not to mention the lost files, information arriving late and frustrated doctors and payers.”

Meeting hospital needs: The preferred choice

Dylan and his team selected MOVEit after evaluating it against other well-known file transfer products. Key criteria included a solution that is highly secure, allows transfers to be set up quickly and easily, handles large files, integrates with multiple platforms, provides an audit trail, and confirms that files have arrived successfully. After carefully evaluating the options available, they determined that MOVEit was the best choice.

“MOVEit does everything we need at a lower cost, and it was also one of the easiest solutions to implement. Some of the other products required programming and learning their scripting languages. MOVEit is drag and drop, which makes it very easy for people to learn and use.”

Since going live, MOVEit has provided the 24x7 reliability that Rochester General depends on for its financial health. The Progress product has never crashed in over a year of sustained use, doing its job day in and day out regardless of file size or network connection.