Automating Pre-registration from IDX to Meditech - Mt. Auburn Hospital

Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge Massachusetts is part of Care Group, Inc. - representing over 1500 beds in seven acute care facilities with 53 sub-acute, ambulatory and home health care facilities. Like many care facilities, Mount Auburn found that attaching accurate patient information to specimens going from clinics and physician offices to hospitals was a problem. In some cases only handwritten patient information accompanies a specimen to the hospital lab creating many inaccuracies including wrong insurance, wrong address, or simply illegible writing. Lab personnel were taking time to register patients using this information which delayed ordering lab work and ultimately caused billing delays, costly corrections, and re-billing issues.

Robert Todd, Director of CareGroup IS at Mount Auburn Hospital and his staff realized that if the samples and/or patient could be pre-registered, then the lab personnel could order the lab work needed without having to perform the registration based solely on the information delivered with the specimen. In addition, accurate pre-registration would save time and money by smoothing the billing process. They found their solution by scripting the pre-registration with Boston WorkStation™.

Mount Auburn has been using Boston WorkStation for some time and is familiar with its capabilities as a highly reliable, integration and automation tool that is effective with even the most closed systems. They used Boston WorkStation to develop a script which runs unattended and in real time to pre-register patients and/or specimen for lab work.

When a sample is drawn, the physician’s office sends patient information to a text file in their IDX physician system. The Boston WorkStation script runs continuously Monday through Friday 8am through 6pm automatically logging in and checking for new files with patients to be registered. When it finds one, it automatically registers the patient into the hospital’s Meditech Magic system and produces an audit file detailing the number of records processed and any exceptions that were encountered. In addition, the script formats and sorts an Excel™ spreadsheet that details all of the actual data sent from the physician’s office. Both files are produced daily and are date stamped., and the actual data is backed up. At the end of the day, a copy of the exception report and the Excel spreadsheet is emailed to a distribution list for review.

The script has been very successful for Mount Auburn, and they are in the process of expanding the system to at least 14 additional offices. "We've not only improved the quality of information that accompanies a patient or specimen to the hospital," commented Todd, "we have been able to realize faster turn-around in billing with fewer corrections and our lab personnel are ordering lab work instead of registering patients."