Project North Woods

Project North Woods was the technical discovery and integration of the seven Ascension hospitals and their surrounding twenty-three clinics into the Aspirus Health Care system.

Business Need

Aspirus Inc. hired me as a contractor to work on the discovery of the Ascension computer systems, set up the required hardware and software for EPIC go live, work on the WAN cutovers, and migrate existing hardware to Aspirus’s domain.

Aspirus

Discovery

Discovery

During the discovery stage My first task was to come up with a timeline for completing the on-site walkthrough and discovery. My fellow contractors and I deliberated and provided a acceptable timeline for completion. While awaiting the timeline's approval we were provided maps of the locations I noticed that they included room numbers and suggested that we all add the room numbers to location-based spreadsheets so that while on-site we could be sure that we visited every room. Shortly after our timeline was approved by both companies, we started our walkthrough.

My Role during this phase was to inventory all the End host devices, peripherals, and specialty software. Other Members of the team gathered information on the MFDs, phones, and documented locations on the maps.

EPIC Go Live

We installed the necessary hardware, built print queues, and were on-site to troubleshoot any issues that arose during it.

I was assigned the Stevens Point Hospital, which was the largest site going live. During the go live I troubleshot WAN issues, Print issues, workflow issues and more.

EPIC

WAN Cutover

WAN-Cutover

The next phase of the project was the WAN cutovers where I was onsite assisting in moving the connections from the old stack to the new network stacks.

Once the Cut was done, I would round and troubleshoot and Connectivity issues that the end hosts were having.

Desktop Migration

In this phase of the project, we needed to move all the PCs from the Ascension Domain to the Aspirus Domain.

At first, we tried to do this with Altiris automation and in place but due to the variations in builds it failed. We adopted a new strategy of swapping the PCs with Aspirus ones then imaging the PCs we removed and then redeploying them.

Desktop-Migration

My Role

My role as one of 6 contractors was to complete the afore-mentioned tasks while training and leading the rest of the contractors in our efforts.

Challenges

Time and the contrators inital understanding of epic systems and backend

What I Learned

From this project I learned the importance of collaboration, detailed discovery, and knowledgeable troubleshooting.