One of the greatest technology challenges facing any hospital is exchanging, integrating, sharing, and retrieving electronic health information across multiple systems. The complexity of building interfaces to share vital data continues to prove daunting (and expensive) for many healthcare providers.
At Indiana Regional Medical Center, system interoperability has taken a huge leap forward with iatricSystems EasyConnect Jaguar interface engine, a software tool that allows hospital staff to build the interfaces they need without the need for coding. Rather than months of development work, in-house staff can create interfaces quickly and easily using an intuitive dashboard that shields them from the underlying technical heavy lifting.
Simplicity that Saves Money
Donna Jackson, Clinical Analyst at Indiana Regional Medical Center, explains that the ability to modify existing definitions is much more efficient than continually building interfaces from scratch. “Using EasyConnect Jaguar, we now have much more flexibility for building and maintaining the interfaces we need. For example, if we need to connect another physician office that uses an Allscripts EMR system, we already have the criteria and filters in place. We can replicate the settings, make a few adjustments for the specific practice, and have the interface ready for testing within an hour. Otherwise it would have taken weeks to build the connection.”
This simplicity translates to significant cost savings. “Last year, we saved about $25,000 using the iatricSystems interface engine. With the additional connections we plan to build, this year the savings will be much higher,” Donna adds.
Interfaces Built So Far
EasyConnect Jaguar provides a central hub for integrating a wide variety of systems both within Indiana Regional Medical Center and externally to EMR systems used in physician practices. A long-time iatricSystems customer, Indiana Regional already used another iatricSystems product, Physician Office Integration, to connect with outside physician practices. No problem—the existing product simply plugs into EasyConnect Jaguar, much like an extension cord with multiple branches.
To date, some of the interfaces Donna has built include internal ADT interfaces to a radiology billing application from Radcom, a coding product from Links, and an ER reporting system from Blue Panda. She has also created external interfaces to physician practices running EMR systems from ADAPTAMED, Allscripts, and MedReport. Using EasyConnect Jaguar, she applied filters and transformations to raw feeds of lab and radiology data flowing into the interface engine to create tailored feeds flowing out to each practice. All these interfaces are now live, and many others are in the testing or planned phase.
Donna adds that EasyConnect Jaguar is allowing her to create interfaces between internal systems and to outside physician practices—with efficiency never before possible. “I’m constantly getting requests from physician offices,” Donna says. “I’m building multiple interfaces in parallel, at different stages of assembly and testing. I don’t wait until I complete one; for example, right now I have three new interfaces underway.”
Designed with Real-World Experience
iatricSystems drew upon its 20+ years of experience of helping many different healthcare information systems interface with more than 700 healthcare vendor systems. The result is an advanced interface engine solution filled with practical features for building connections between a variety of system architectures and data formats, even by non-technical users. Donna particularly likes the dragand-drop functionality, the dashboard with a real-time view of all connections, and the testing and development environment that allows interfaces to be perfected without disrupting live operations. She adds that the ability to define email and text message alerts is another advantage. “It tells you if another vendor’s server is down or if there are connectivity issues, and it guides you to where the issues are so they can be fixed quickly with little or no downtime.”
A Better Way to Exchange Data
Donna adds that any hospital looking for an easier way to exchange data between different systems should strongly consider the EasyConnect Jaguar interface engine. “EasyConnect Jaguar provides the flexibility and control we need to build interfaces in a timely manner rather than wait for someone to build them for us. It’s very cost-effective and convenient; especially with the support from iatricSystems we can call upon when we need it.”
To learn more about EasyConnect Jaguar please contact us using the information below.