Headquartered in Dallas, Texas, CHRISTUS Health is a Catholic, faith-based, not-for-profit health system comprised of almost 350 services and facilities, including more than 50
hospitals and long-term care facilities, 175 clinics and outpatient centers, and dozens of other health ministries and ventures. CHRISTUS services can be found in 60 cities in Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri and Georgia in the U.S. and Chiapas, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, and Tamaulipas in Mexico.
Mitch Lawrence, lead application analyst handling reporting and scripting for MEDITECH, and the Information Management (IM) staff at CHRISTUS Health handle myriad tasks, such as printing reports, downloading vendor data and data entry across all departments, including Lab, Pharmacy, Billing, Quality Management and Admissions, Emergency Department management and Medical Records. At first glance, it might seem that the IM staff would need to spend 24 hours a day seven days a week to get through its to-do list. However, the group uses Boston WorkStation™, which helps automate time-consuming, repetitive and manual tasks. CHRISTUS has more than 400 Boston WorkStation scripts in play throughout the organization. Boston WorkStation helps CHRISTUS improve staff efficiency, data accuracy and overall cost savings.
Virtualization boosts workflow efficiency beyond scripting
But efficiency can come with a price. Just recently, managing hundreds of scripts turned out to be a nightmare. As requests for automating tasks poured in, server space dwindled. At one point, the CHRISTUS team had 200 scripts on one server, which filled the schedule,
preventing them from filling requests for additional scripts. To solve this problem, CHRISTUS implemented virtualization technology and realized an immediate boost to the capacity for workflow automation projects for the entire CHRISTUS systems.
Having a single virtual server per region has enabled CHRISTUS Health to spread out its scripts, making them more manageable and efficient. Taking the "many hands make light work" approach, a single vendor download request for all regions that would take eight hours to complete with a typical standalone script now takes a fraction of the time when split up properly among virtual servers. Being able to load additional scripts onto the servers creates more opportunities for efficiencies with its workflow automation projects, as well as the system of shared functions within the projects themselves.
Making another change to improve efficiency
About a year and a half ago, the CHRISTUS Health Information Management department's implementation team realized it needed a more flexible, scalable and interoperable scripting tool and switched from Summit Healthcare to Boston Software Systems.
Initially, the support team was hesitant to change to Boston WorkStation™. However, Mitch quickly realized the benefits. Boston WorkStation is a workflow automation and integration
technology that allows healthcare organizations to respond to changing business, financial and compliance requirements by automating common tasks throughout the organization including revenue cycle projects, interactions with Web sites, integrating new applications, systems and devices, and electronically monitoring and managing user activity.
"The support team was not initially consulted on the change," Mitch says. "They simply decided they were going to move forward with Boston WorkStation™. We participated in a training class and I thought, 'I don't know if I want to use this.' You know how people are with change. We were basically forced into it. In the end, this was a positive change because Boston WorkStation is a lot easier to use and has more functionality."
"The nurses, doctors and business staff would have to come in at midnight to generate reports they needed for the next day," Mitch says. "Now, the IM department uses Boston WorkStation to do it for them and saves them from having to come in. In turn, they don't have to spend money on overtime or on hiring a full-time employee to simply run all the reports. Instead, it's something IM handles, and in the end, saves them a lot of money."
Reporting in a flash
In the Emergency, Nursing and Lab departments, Mitch has developed two-part Boston WorkStation scripts that allow them to share information between MEDITECH and McKesson
systems. The first part automatically creates a spreadsheet of accounts for the previous day's discharges. The script then pulls in discharge summary, nursing notes and other information by account as individual text files from MEDITECH and imports them into McKesson's Horizon Performance Manager. The savings are significant. The CHRISTUS Health IM and nursing staff were previously required to manually input the information - a process that could take six people up to eight hours of data entry depending on how many discharges the hospital had. The Boston WorkStation scripts complete their daily tasks in around 90 minutes, saving CHRISTUS Health the resources it would take to accomplish the task manually.
Third-party lab billing made easy
CHRISTUS Health uses an application that downloads information related to lab procedures to create reports for third-party billers for pathology. The downloads provide such items as demographics and insurance charge information. CHRISTUS Health uses Boston WorkStation to execute an NPR (Meditech custom report) depending on its data needs. The NPR creates the data file in a local directory on the virtual server where the network operation center picks up the file, packages it according to security measures and encryption and sends it via secure e-mail or FTP to a third-party vendor.
If this process were to be done manually, not only would it take personnel to execute the NPRs and deliver the data files, it would need to be done at all hours of the day and night due to vendor data requirements. With Boston WorkStation, the CHRISTUS IM team can provide files on a timely basis automatically, without any human intervention.
Rewarding the most important resource One of the most common data entry tasks that the IM department is asked to do is to script in annual raises. With anywhere from 1,000 to 5,000 employees in any one region, such a job would require four to five people over a week of data entry to accomplish this.
Using a Boston WorkStation script, the task can be done in much less time. Often a single
computer working around 24 hours can script in the raises for an entire region's employees (about 5,000 records), ensuring that the most important resource of a hospital, the staff, are rewarded in a timely manner.
CHRISTUS also runs Kronos timekeeping records. Boston WorkStation pulls personnel data from Meditech for import into Kronos on a daily and weekly basis. In some cases, the data is extracted directly to the Kronos file servers, in others, the task processor will pick up the files on the virtual servers and deliver them to the Kronos servers.
Getting the right information to the right people
CHRISTUS Health is using Boston WorkStation to automatically generate regularly needed reports. The Boston WorkStation scripts generate reports directly to the appropriate department printers. Each script condenses an hour's worth of manual work into five minutes. As a result, staff has up-to-the minute information about patients, helping to ensure the best care for patients.
To see how you can apply Boston WorkStation to automate workflow in your organization, visit www.bostonworkstation.com or call us directly at 866 653 5105.
