Michelle Barker at Cambridge Health Alliance (CHA) in Somerville Massachusetts had
plenty to do. Along with several other very aggressive projects, she was testing software changes in preparation for an upgrade of the facility’s Meditech system.
CHA had been using the Report Transcription routines in the Meditech ITS module for several years, and had begun the process of implementing Electronic Signature for their Medical Records department.
When they were setting up the new report templates they discovered that the original templates had been set up incorrectly. The previous analyst had set the reports to be finalized electronically at a Signed status when they should have been finalized at Draft since the providers were manually signing the reports in the Medical Records office.
All the reports that had been typed over the past four years were going to the providers' Electronic Signature Queue. Some providers had over 1,000 reports in their queue, one provider had several thousand. There were about 20,000 reports total that needed to be brought to a Signed status. CHA knew there was no way the providers would be willing or able to electronically sign all those reports in order to clean up their queues. Medical Records did not have the staffing to do the job and it looked like the project was going to be put on hold.
In order to keep the project moving Barker volunteered to bring the reports to a Signed status manually. She set aside two hours each day where she did nothing but enter report numbers and change the report status. She was able to complete about 500 reports daily. After a month (and about 60 hours) she was three quarters of the way through the list, and still had about 5,000 reports to go.
CHA had recently purchased the scripting tool, Boston WorkStation, and Barker enrolled in the remote training sessions. “I had very limited programming experience, but BWS was very easy to use,” said Barker. After the training, she created a script that took the list of report numbers, entered them into the Meditech routine and allowed her to mass sign them. “I was able to do twenty hours worth of work in about two – including the time it took me to write the script!” Barker figures the whole job could have taken $2,400 in labor costs if she had completed it by hand. “If I had Boston WorkStation when I first started this project the total labor costs would have been only $150 to write and run the script”.
Since then Barker has developed scripts to mass update several of their dictionaries (which was a crucial step for their Meditech 5.3 go live preparation); created scripts allowing their HR department to quickly add clothing and cleaning allowances and retro payments onto employee timecards and update raises; and written scripts to clean up their User dictionary and staff access for HIPAA. “With Boston WorkStation, we don't think twice now about taking on large, time consuming, dictionary restructuring projects, or mass editing tasks”.
