13
rounds of test files before Trinity Health’s data was clean enough to move
Trinity Health, a three-hospital system serving a stretch of rural North Dakota roughly the size of Ohio, is implementing Workday and Epic as a single program. CIO John McDaniel, FACHDM, shared what the cleanup taught his team with CHIME’s Digital Health Insights, and we are proud to call Trinity Health an e4health partner.
Why it matters
Dirty data reveals itself during system transitions: an acquisition, a move off legacy platforms, or a major EHR implementation. That is also the best window to fix it.
Trinity Health’s story shows what fixing it actually takes: clear ownership, a single source of truth, and a team willing to grind through 13 iterations before go-live instead of cleaning up after it.
What Trinity Health learned
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Testing exposed the real scope
The full extent of the problem surfaced when the team began testing Workday integrations. Siloed applications held redundant data, and every test file turned up more duplicate and bad records, sending the team back for another pass.
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Assign data owners and pick a source of truth
Trinity decided which application holds the trusted version of each data set, then assigned an owner. Nothing changes without that owner’s knowledge and consent, and that source feeds both Epic and Workday.
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Clean data pays off before go-live
The cleanup let the team start reshaping today’s workflows for Epic and surfaced billing improvements, so Trinity tuned up its revenue cycle ahead of the Epic push.
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Technology is rarely the problem. Culture is.
After more than 50 years in health IT, McDaniel has seen good systems fail because users would not adopt them or tried to run old processes on new tools. Trinity walked staff through current state and future state so they could see the change coming and shape how they would work with it.
“The issue, especially in rural organizations, is culture. Will the people work with the technology?”
Where Trinity stands
Running Workday and Epic as one program avoided duplicated integration work, and McDaniel says he would make the same call again.
- Live on Workday Complete, with cleaner data loaded from day one.
- Building Orchard with Epic Partnering with Epic on an implementation process right-sized for smaller organizations.
- Epic go-live Target: end of 2027.
Read the full interview on CHIME Digital Health Insights
What a rural North Dakota health system learned from 13 rounds of data cleanup for Epic and WorkdayOur take
Trinity Health’s experience lines up with what we see across the 400+ health systems e4health serves.
- Make data integrity its own workstream. Give it an owner, a budget, and a timeline, not a line item buried in the implementation plan. Trinity’s data owners are exactly that.
- Start before the build. Duplicate patient records, legacy documents, and inconsistent master data are far easier to remediate before they are mapped into the new system.
- Decide what moves. Not everything in the legacy environment belongs in the new one. Defining the designated record set up front tells the team what to migrate, what to archive, and what to retire.
e4health supports health systems before, during, and after Epic migrations, from legacy system support and clinical data abstraction to eMPI cleanup and IT testing.
Meet us at CHIME Fall Forum
John McDaniel and the e4health team will both be there this November. If a system transition is on your roadmap, come find us and compare notes.