Healthcare providers are in a catch-22. On the one hand, delivering reliable imaging for their physicians, less complexity for their technical teams, and better care for their patients means needing to continually refresh and update their cardiology and imaging workflow solutions. Patient imaging volumes don’t slow down based on the age of your hardware. On the other hand, the practicality of making these continuous updates – not just the budget, but the time and logistical commitments of implementing new solutions – can often look like, and act like, major barriers to adoption.
That’s why we made Merge Hemo Mixed Mode.
Merge Hemo Mixed Mode marks an important advancement in how eligible Merge Hemo customers can plan and execute phased upgrades. Upgrading to the capabilities and features available in newer supported Merge Hemo releases is no longer a “and/or” decision between technology and budget, or technology and implementation timeline. Upgrading does not necessarily require customers to make the full financial and implementation commitment every lab at the same time. Merge Hemo Mixed Mode instead spreads those out over time, diluting the burden on clinical and technical teams while still ensuring those same teams can begin taking advantage of the latest Merge Hemo capabilities now and not further down the line.
Eligible Merge Hemo users looking to minimize lab downtime (and its impacts on patient care) but do not have the budget to make the full forklift upgrade – in which all applicable labs are upgraded as part of one coordinated implementation – to Merge Hemo v11 across all of their labs can bridge that gap with Merge Hemo Mixed Mode.
Mixed Mode is a deployment strategy that lets supported and compatible Merge Hemo v10 and v11 environments coexist during a phased upgrade. A user might upgrade one lab to v11 while other labs remain on a supported v10 release until they are ready.
This enables eligible Merge Hemo customers to take advantage of some of the capabilities of v11 on a granular level – customized to a particular facility, department, or lab that needs it – without having to commit a full-scale, across-the-board upgrade and making the financial and logistical investments that that scale of an upgrade entails. Best of all, Mixed Mode reduces the operational impact of upgrades by letting organizations upgrade their labs in phases, while keeping other labs operational during a particular lab’s upgrade process.
Want to upgrade all of your labs and facilities to the latest Merge Hemo version available? Great! We are more than happy to help you do that. For many healthcare organizations, though, the time it takes to undergo an upgrade may feel like an impossible hurdle to clear. After all, a one-lab hardware upgrade can take approximately four to eight hours.* The Merge implementation performs the applicable equipment and system connection activities in coordination with the customer’s clinical and technical teams. During that time, the lab is not available. A hospital can account for this for by diverting patients to a different lab or planning for a lighter patient load that day. But it’s still a four to eight hour* window where the lab will be down. When upgrading multiple labs, depending on the number of labs and the implementation schedule, that timeline can extend the overall upgrade program across several days and introduce cumulative operational and financial impacts.
We can make that process easier for clinicians, technical teams, and patients by performing just one lab upgrade per day, in order to maintain care continuity, but that sometimes that’s not always an option. That’s why we created Merge Hemo Mixed Mode: to help organizations maintain operational continuity, by limiting upgrade-related downtime to the labs being upgraded while other compatible labs remain operational.
Whether and whenever you choose to upgrade to the next version of Merge Hemo, Mixed Mode allows supported and compatible v10 and v11 labs to operate within the same customer environment during a phased upgrade, so organizations can begin using v11 capabilities in upgraded labs while planning the transition of their remaining labs.
Want to get started with Mixed Mode? Let us know and we will work on next steps, including confirming your compatibility requirements.