Samaritan Health System

Samaritan Health System uses Summit Express Connect to meet their Integration Goals

The Challenge:

Samaritan Health System, a 287-bed full-service community hospital, and Samaritan Keep Home, a 272-bed long term care nursing home in Northern New York needed to integrate ADT and Lab results to additional vendors, but didn’t want to purchase more point to point interfaces. They had requests for several interface projects and did not want to pay MEDITECH for each one. In addition, they needed to be able to send results out to the Physician Offices.

They were finding that it was impossible to apply the filtering needed for each vendor. They had to rely on vendors to do the interface work, which was very time consuming and expensive. They were spending a lot of time resolving interface customization issues between the vendors and MEDITECH. Troubleshooting interfaces was difficult as was reviewing the logs of interface traffic.

The Solution:

Samaritan Health System implemented Summit Express Connect ink to Products/Interface Engine/Summit Express Connect ] a full featured interface engine that can bridge all their vendor systems and give them the power and flexibility to manage their interfaces. With the Summit Integration Suite Samaritan Health is able to leverage existing interfaces throughout the hospital and to the physician offices to save them money on interface purchases from MEDITECH. In addition, not having to be the liaison between Meditech and the vendors for interface customization is a big time saver for Samaritan Health. They are able to make the vendor customizations to the interfaces themselves which makes the process much more streamlined.

Samaritan Health has found significant cost savings by allowing staff to concentrate on priority projects while the Summit Healthcare engine does the work. Without Summit Express Connect the IT staff at Samaritan believes the management of interfaces alone would be a full time job. Through the Summit Dashboard, the staff quickly recognized the ease of use for monitoring their interface landscape using tools such as the Message Viewer and Message Submission functionality.

Engagement Highlights:

• Able to realize our integration goals, including Physician Office Integration , in a very short timeframe
• Leveraged existing interfaces for a cost savings of $5-10,000 per interface for the initial interface purchase plus savings in annual maintenance costs
• Significant cost savings being realized due to the fact that Samaritan Health can maintain all of their interfaces themselves
• Time savings realized by not having to be the liaison between MEDITECH and the vendors for interface customization
• Streamlined their interface development process by being able to make their own vendor customizations
• Managing and troubleshooting interface issues is simple, ensuring that the end users have access to the patient data they need in real time