Meadville Medical Center is a 217-bed community hospital located in Meadville, Pennsylvania. With more than 1,300 staff, Meadville is Crawford County’s largest employer and the hospital of choice for people in the region.
Like other hospitals, patient care at Meadville depends on electronic patient data flowing smoothly between different healthcare systems. In Meadville’s case, interfaces need to connect its HIS with other hospital systems as well as the EMR systems used by physicians in private practice. For many hospitals, creating these interfaces would be a challenge. Meadville has found an easy, cost-effective way to build and manage the interfaces it needs using the EasyConnect Jaguar interface engine.
“EasyConnect Jaguar gives us complete control over all elements of our HL7 interfaces,” says Howard Minor, SQL Programmer Analyst at Meadville Medical Center. “We’re able to create custom interfaces ourselves and manage many, many more interfaces without having to hire extra staff. By owning this process, we don’t have to rely on other vendors or consultants, and this saves us a great deal of time and money.”
Meadville currently has about 25 live interfaces, with plans for dozens more. Interfaces built by the IT team include feeds to and from its HIS and numerous vendor applications such as Vecna and Varian (for ADT transmissions), Welch Allyn (ADT and ORU results for nursing monitors), Viztek (ORM radiology orders), Nuance (transcribed dictation reports), other ORU radiology reports, lab interfaces, and connections to multiple different physician EMR systems.
Interface Monitoring 24/7/365
EasyConnect Jaguar also makes interfaces easy to manage after they’re built. Howard and his team regularly use the color-coded status display and iatricSystems iAlerts that monitor various interface status points 24/7/365. “Just last week we had an issue where memory allocation on a server reached the threshold we had set as a limit. The iAlert allowed us to fix the problem immediately before the client was even aware of it.”
What’s Next?
Howard has ambitious plans for future interfaces, and with EasyConnect Jaguar he has an interface engine that brings his goals within reach. “We have more physician offices we need to bring on board, which means we’ll have a lot more feeds coming in and results going out. We’re planning to use the engine to relay our CCDs, we’re planning additional ADTs, and eventually we’d like to get to XML bidirectional feeds. EasyConnect Jaguar gives us the ability to create these custom interfaces and transformations in-house, and we’re very pleased to have that control.”