When Mergers Happen: Doubling Your Institutional Repository’s Scope Overnight

Aurora Health Care in Wisconsin and Advocate Health Care in Illinois merged into Advocate Aurora Health in 2018. Advocate Aurora Health is a large, multistate health care system that has 26 hospitals, over 500 sites of care, and 75,000 employees. Aurora Health Care implemented an institutional repository (IR) in 2013. Through the merger we were able to expand our IR to include Advocate content in the summer of 2020. In this presentation, we will discuss: Key stakeholder relationships that helped us build the reputation of the IR at legacy Aurora Health Care and ultimately secured support at a system level for continuing and expanding our repository contract; Tips for renegotiating the contract and cost; Workflow and staffing changes we implemented to accommodate the increase in content that more than doubled the scope of our IR; Marketing strategies we have employed to date in our efforts to expand the repository to Advocate staff and departments; Wins and challenges we encountered throughout this process; Our planned next steps as we look ahead