Expediting Hospital Implementation Conversions, Avera McKennan Hospital

Avera McKennan Hospital in Sioux Falls, South Dakota is growing very quickly. They have implemented Meditech at thirteen hospitals throughout Iowa, South Dakota and Minnesota. These implementations might have created a real roadblock for the IT department, but Integration Engineer Ross Stolle is able to keep up with these huge projects quickly and inexpensively.

Stolle was faced with moving all of the patient records from the hospital's existing systems into Meditech to create medical records for each of the patients and demographic recall - the data associated with the patients such as address, next of kin, insurance information, etc.. In addition, they needed to move visit history, A/R balances forward, along with creating bad debt accounts. Stolle reviewed his alternatives. To hire an outside company could cost up to $80,000 and require time for installation and testing. Manually key punching that amount of data was not an option - it would take months to accomplish.

Stolle turned to Boston WorkStation. He was familiar with this popular scripting tool since it is used for his hospital's dictionary creation and maintenance. He realized that if he could automate the conversion of this data, he could save a great deal of money and get the new patients into the system faster and more accurately than by doing it manually.

Stolle downloaded the source data from the other hospital system into Excel. He cleaned up the data and then wrote a script that would move all the demographic and patient insurance data to Meditech. The script took three to four days to develop. Moving some fifty fields of data was the most complicated part and that took just a day. Stolle uses the same basic script for each new hospital implementation's data conversion project. The most recent one presented 10,000 records that needed to be converted. The script took two days to move the 10,000 complete demographic profiles.

Boston WorkStation is an integral part of the total integration solution in place at Avera McKennan. In addition to speeding up the conversion of new hospital data, Stolle is using Boston WorkStation to automate their daily 835/837 remittance posting; syncing dictionaries across facilities; and creating charts in medical records for discharged patients.

Boston WorkStation is also used to solve unusual projects that crop up. One such project was correcting the patient address on 235 account records. The script took ten minutes to write and two minutes to run.

Avera McKennan upgraded to a site license as they recognized how much Boston WorkStation could do for them. "The site license makes it much easier to get projects done rapidly because I can put the script on any PC to run." Stolle adds, "Writing scripts is fun and everyone thinks you're a 'genius'!"