How to End Manual Processes & Integration Issues at your McKesson Hospital

[Tara Marchi]

Crawl before you can walk, walk before you can run...we all are very familiar with the concept.  But how many individuals that you know leap into huge automation and integration projects without knowing the why behind the how?  If you don’t clearly understand the ‘why’ of a project, knowing the ‘what’, ‘when’ and ‘how’ is harder than you think! 

Enter in Scripting… scripting is the jack of all trades.  Motto in the Summit halls “if you can type it, you can script it!”  Scripting is typically categorized in three flavors:  Batch, Real-Time, and Interactive.  Batch scripts are the big time savers allowing you to connect to a datasource (i.e. spreadsheet) and enter in buckets of data in minutes with no human transcription errors!  Talk about efficiency.

Back to the original question though – how many times has your organization been faced with the situation where you need to connect to a disparate 3^rd party system and interfacing is just simply not possible or cost prohibited? Or perhaps your desired interface is needed immediately but the timelines delivered by your HCIS or 3^rd party vendor just don’t jive?

Again enter in scripting!  A scripted interface (Real-Time) is quick to deploy and can achieve a near real-time data exchange as well as provide a means to map or cross-walk data between systems. Some examples include Blood Bank interfaces, glucose interfaces, point of care devices, streamlined registration or remote office connectivity.  The possibilities are endless!  We have clients currently integrating clinical patient centric data between their 3^rd party ED systems and their HCIS with scripting playing a key role. Talk about cost savings, ease of use and contributing to the goal of a comprehensive patient EMR.

Last use case worth mentioning because I don’t know about you but time is precious these days… Ever consider interactive scripting?  Let the script act as a FTE.  Examples include patient registration kiosks and real-time eligibility/insurance verifications.

Finally, a few words of wisdom to impart; Set the standard high on what automation technology you are going to invest in.  You want a reliable and scalable solution to handle any of the flavors above including a technology platform that is interchangeable no matter what HCIS or HCIS version you are running.

Tara Marchi is the Director of Marketing for Summit Healthcare, working with McKesson Hospitals for over 10 years with their integration and scripting processes.

 

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