Charleston Area Medical Center (CAMC) is West Virginia's largest medical center with 913 beds in three campuses, ambulatory facilities and a number of physician offices and health clinics. This burgeoning organization needed a way to update the hospital's master patient index with information from ambulatory medical locations. The challenge was getting the hospital's Siemens Invision® system and its Enterprise Access Directory to interface effectively with Medical Manager, which the ambulatory offices are using. Moving patient registration data between these two systems would allow emergency department doctors to determine if patients being treated at the hospital had recently been seen at one of the clinics. This is particularly important when dealing with those in fragile categories, such as cancer patients. Sharing this sensitive information among systems is a regulatory requirement for CAMC, as well as a patient safety issue the organization wanted to address. However, CAMC was struggling with a cost effective solution to this problem.
Looking for the Right Integration Solution
David Dickens, a systems analyst within CAMC's IT department, realized that integrating information between Siemens Invision and Medical Manager would be time consuming and require manual data entry. This process could result in multiple errors, such as duplicate patient information or, even worse, overwriting good data with incorrect data. He needed a way to take selected fields from Medical Manager and expand them into Siemens Invision in order to get patient information into the main patient database at the hospital. Dickens discovered that by using Boston WorkStation from Boston Software Systems he could easily automate this entire process.
Boston WorkStation is workflow automation and integration technology that provides an environment for on-demand process innovation and development. Boston WorkStation allows healthcare organizations to dynamically respond to changing business requirements by automating common tasks, creating complex processes, automating interaction with websites, or integrating new applications, systems and devices.
Myriad Platforms; One Language, One Place!
Dickens discussed the projects requirements with the Boston Software Systems’
support team. He was able to develop a process that retrieves ADT information from Medical Manager using a Boston WorkStation script to process an HL7 file from Medical Manager. The information is then posted into Invision using decision rules that CAMC designed with the help of the Boston WorkStation team. CAMC not only has the IBM mainframe platform, but also a large numbers of servers running both Windows and Unix. Their Medical Manager data set is a large MSO serialization running on an AIX platform, and Invision runs on a mainframe system.
As a side benefit CAMC was able to develop three daily output reports which list every patient registration the system was able to process and update the information to the master grid. These reports also "red flag" registration errors. The system sends an email to management personnel notifying them of the error and enables data entry staff to review and correct errors, resulting in more accurate patient data.
Spreading the Wealth
"We might input 125 patients per day at just one of our practices. If it takes about three minutes to handle the input, we're saving more than six hours of manual labor per day. That translates to nearly $20,000 per year of cost savings. And that's just for one facility," said Dickens. CAMC has 100 people in its IT department scattered over the three campuses. Due to the high success of the technology in the hospital, CAMC is looking to expand the use of Boston WorkStation with other programs and departments within its health system.
"Boston WorkStation is performing magnificently. CAMC was able to eliminate a very time consuming and costly process of manually entering data from and to disparate sources. Our integration and workflow automation processes do exactly what we need them to do and with the added bonus of proper error checking," said Dickens. "We need to recognize that we have an opportunity to solve more than simple and small problems. We need to tap into the power of Boston WorkStation throughout CAMC."
