What do you do with the reporting jobs that for one reason or another never seem to get done on time? George Winterberg, System Analyst at Saint Anthony’s Health Center in Alton, Illinois found a way to get them done with no excuses, accurately and on time.
The 15 reports Saint Anthony’s typically runs from their Meditech system took about three working days to accomplish. Then those files required maintenance - the cleaning of unwanted characters and proper appending which took another three hours. The cleaned files were uploaded via the Internet to Care Science, Saint Anthony’s care management company. This took another three hours - 30 man-hours altogether. “Due to days off, vacations, sick time, or just a lapse of memory, these reports were rarely run on time,” says Winterberg. When he was introduced to Boston WorkStation, he immediately saw the possibilities.
He discussed the projects requirements with Boston WorkStation support team. The script must be able to Log into Meditech, select the appropriate report from the Meditech Menu, run the report inputting the correct dates when prompted, and download the report to a flat text file on the PC. The script should be capable of running the correct report on a given day, log back out of Meditech, clean any unwanted characters from the flat text file, and put itself to sleep until it is time to run the next report. When all files have been collected, the script should also have the ability to log onto the internet, go to the correct web page, and upload the flat text files to Care Science.
Ultimately his scripting solution was developed to wake up on the 7th day of January, April, July, and October, and run one NPR report in the ADM module of Meditech, then download it to a folder on the PC. The script then goes to sleep until the 15th day of March, June, September, and December, when it wakes back up and runs a list of 14 additional NPR reports from the B/AR, MIS, ABS, MSM, & PHA modules of Meditech, and downloads them to the same folder. The script goes through each downloaded file and deletes any unwanted characters.
For a particular piece of data, one NPR report of the hospital's Resource Master is downloaded, except for the pharmacy items. The script then runs a second NPR report that downloads just the pharmacy portion. This is necessary because the pharmacy portion has to deal with constantly changing prices from the upload of the AWP. After both portions are downloaded and the ‘cleaner’ subroutine runs, it reads both files and appends the pharmacy file onto the end of the Resource Master. When all of the files have been downloaded, appended, and run through the ‘cleaner’, the script logs onto the Internet, goes to the correct web page, enters the hospital's user ID and password, and then sends these files to Care Science. When completed, the script the goes back to sleep until it is needed again.
Winterberg found BWS Support “...very responsive. If you get in over your head, help is one toll free call away!” He finds the possibilities for using BWS are endless. Next, he may develop a script to help meet HIPAA requirements for archiving Meditech audit files.
