Lakeridge Health Implements the Summit Scripting Toolkit to Automate Their Clinical Point of Care Devices with their Meditech HIS
The Challenge:
Lakeridge Health, one of the largest community hospital networks in the Canadian province of Ontario, had many point of care devices collecting glucose values. The Nursing staff relies on these point of care devices to gather the glucose value as part of the overall patient care and documentation for the patient EMR. The glucose point of care devices are a stand-alone system that does not integrate with the Meditech HIS which is a major shortcoming as this valuable information is not available to all clinicians as part of the comprehensive patient EMR. Lakeridge Health needed to find a cost effective and safe way to ensure these glucose values were available in the Meditech EMR.
The Solution:
Lakeridge Health in conjunction with Summit Healthcare reviewed the options available to integrate the disparate systems. One approach would be to utilize HL7 interfacing in a point to point environment but this proved to be too costly and customization would be required. Due to the breath of product line that Summit Healthcare offers the marketplace, it was determined that the best tool for this integration would be the Summit Scripting Toolkit. The Summit Scripting Toolkit (SST) was able to act as an end user or “emulate” by populating the Meditech EMR. The Summit Scripting Toolkit was used to gather the information from the devices, evaluate if duplicates exist, filter data that is considered erroneous or control, then post the data into Meditech all via a script! The transaction described above runs unattended and is executed on a recurring schedule that is defined by the hospital.
Engagement Highlights:
- Implementing the automation solution (SST) above it positively impacts patient care by providing critical patient data to all clinicians via the patient EMR.
- The solution saves valuable time and money by automating the entry of data that would otherwise have to be done manually.
- After the success of the above engagement, Lakeridge Health implemented the Summit Scripting Toolkit across the facility to enable them to automate processes across multiple departments and bring other disparate systems together.
“We are extremely pleased with our purchase of the Summit Scripting Toolkit. For approximately the same price we would have paid Meditech for a dedicated, single process, Glucometer interface, we were able to purchase the Summit Scripting Toolkit which, in our opinion, provided a robust, more scalable and open solution for our glucometer project. Plus, at the end of the day, we had a product for use within our corporation with virtually endless possibilities.
We have already developed numerous smaller scale interfaces and scripts, and we are now embarking on another major project which will see automatic laboratory orders being placed at patient registration based on answers to certain queries. No such functionality exists within the standard Meditech software, but with the Summit Scripting Toolkit…it’s a piece of cake!”
