St. Michael’s Hospital Merges Hospital and Clinical Medical Records
An affiliated hospital of Ministry Health Care, Saint Michael’s Hospital is a fully accredited, acute-care facility offering a comprehensive range of services to residents of Stevens Point, Wisconsin and surrounding communities. More than 200 physicians serve on Saint Michael's Hospital medical staff.
Patient safety is a Big Concern
Some time ago St. Michael’s acquired Rice Medical Center’s multi-specialty practice. This 110,000 square-foot state-of-the-art clinic houses more than 75 physicians. As a result, St. Michael’s needed to merge the clinic’s 140,000 patient medical records from LSS into the hospital’s MEDITECH system. As a result, the physicians would need only one ID number to reference a patient’s medical records. Not only would this method enable the physicians to access the information more quickly, but it would also help ensure they accessed the right patient data and thus improve patient safety and confidentiality.
Boston WorkStation Automates Medical Record Merge
Before St. Michael’s began to manually merge the medical records, Tom Dobbs, program analyst, realized it would take approximately 800 hours, or one to two months, of manual effort for a data entry person to handle this task. Even worse, it could result in multiple errors or their overwriting good data with incorrect data. The hospital couldn’t sacrifice the time, money or risk.
Dobbs discovered that by using Boston WorkStation from Boston Software Systems the hospital could easily automate this entire process.
Boston WorkStation is a workflow automation and integration technology that allows healthcare organizations to streamline basic business processes that are fragmented among disparate systems and applications. Powerful integration components enable the creation of efficient processes, automation of common tasks, accelerated completion of conversion and migration projects and integration of new applications, systems and devices.
St. Michael’s performed the merge in about 25 hours over the course of five evenings, so it didn’t disrupt the normal flow of the hospital and made the transition transparent.
Saving Time, Money and Risk
Using Boston Workstation, we were able to quickly, efficiently and accurately perform a process that would have otherwise required several hundred hours of manual effort. Just this one project alone has saved us more than $40,000, which has certainly justified the investment in Boston WorkStation,” said Dobbs.
St. Michael’s uses Boston WorkStation for a number of automation tasks, such as loading dictionaries into its HIS. “In the past, we used all home-grown scripting solutions to process data. Boston WorkStation is a much more efficient and reliable solution,” said Dobbs. “Boston WorkStation is Visual Basic-based, which for us offered a low learning curve. Additionally, Boston Software offers incredible support.
