Posted on behalf of Marianne Soucy, Director, Client Solutions
Remote monitoring capability of your automation and integration products is something that we thought might be good to spotlight this month. This capability is included with your products standardly, it is simply a matter of turning it on and using it well!
The last few months have been incredible to watch, as so many businesses and hospitals implemented remote work protocols at a level and speed truly unprecedented in my entire working experience.
The line level analysts and engineers I have worked with at our client sites have across the board been working under unusual and unanticipated conditions. The challenges have been quite diverse–
- Analysts used to high speed access and multiple monitor screens working overtaxed VPNs on tiny laptop screens
- Analysts with clinical backgrounds pulling double duty as triage nurses or back in patient care
- Members of IT being furloughed or trying to manage their responsibilities in less time, hours cut with hospitals deeply financially impacted by this crisis
- Staff unfamiliar with certain applications covering duties for others who are furloughed or cut hours
- Trying to negotiate access to their networks for interested parties such as Pharmacists and Auditors that otherwise might be able to come on site.
Whether you use Summit products or something else, the same general theories would apply to make sure things are in place.
For your Summit Products, it is important to know that all of them, if configured properly, can be set up to alert you remotely and proactively to any conditions that might need attention. For example:
- INTERFACE ENGINE
- Express Connect and Summit Exchange interface engines both have remote alerting capabilities.
- You can be made aware if disk space is low
- You can be made aware if any individual interface disconnects or goes into trouble status
- You can be made aware if a certain threshold of messages are queued up, signaling a backup of some sort or problems on the Other Vendor side
- (SE only) You can be made aware if any of the services goes offline
- (EC only) You can be made aware if the SQL Service sync goes offline) this is not part of SE’s Architecture)
- Optionally, the Summit Exchange WEB DASHBOARD can give you a mobile enabled, internet facing dashboard view of all your interfaces in real time
- You may want to take a moment to:
- Make sure minimum alert thresholds are set up and active
- Engine wide, message queue threshold alert of, say, 250 messages or more (suggested number)
- Critical interface, individual alerts of, say, 50 messages or more
- Make sure Disk Space and Service threshold alerts are set up
- Make sure purges are running properly and disk space is not at a critical point
- Make sure backups are running! (We have seen increasing Ransomware threats as criminals try to exploit the quick conversion to remote office capabilities)
- Make sure the correct contacts are on any alert distributions, or change to a group email if any staff is rotating or furloughed
- Make sure minimum alert thresholds are set up and active
- Express Connect and Summit Exchange interface engines both have remote alerting capabilities.
- SUMMIT SCRIPTING TOOLKIT
- SST has inherent capabilities to alert if any error conditions are met, and these alerts can be customized based on the nature of the error. For example:
- You can have Error Handling segments do any combination of the following
- Send an alert email
- Close and restart the workflow process
- Send screenshots of the screens and/or logs when the error condition was met
- Kill process on any involved applications and restart cleanly
- Set aside a trouble record (Mark Status) and continue with the next record
- Reboot the machine itself, either periodically or in response to a trouble condition
- Some alerts you might consider setting up:
- Alert if the process is taking too long to complete (Loop timer)
- Alert if no source is found to process (missing files to process)
- Alert if expected reports are not dropping on an expected timeframe, such as with our Business Continuity products Clinical reports
- Alert if Windows expected not found (application changes due to upgrade or issue)
- Our newest upcoming version of the Summit Exchange engine is now capable of performing as a central monitoring dashboard for your scripts as well!
- You can have Error Handling segments do any combination of the following
- SST has inherent capabilities to alert if any error conditions are met, and these alerts can be customized based on the nature of the error. For example:
- ALL ACCESS
- If accessing clinical information from outside your hospital walls is increasingly critical, consider the Web Facing All Access as a possible solution to your needs. Some use cases include:
- Alerting community physicians real time of admissions, discharges, and test results for their patients seen at your hospital
- Replacing Faxing documents like CCDs or medical records with a secure, web-based file sharing mechanism
- Printing patient labels while the main HCIS system is offline
- Providing secure, auditable access to clinical data to interested parties such as
- Payers
- Offsite physicians
- Pharmacies for Medication Reconciliation
- Long Term Care Facilities
- Auditors
- Case Managers
- If accessing clinical information from outside your hospital walls is increasingly critical, consider the Web Facing All Access as a possible solution to your needs. Some use cases include:
If we can help you implement any of the above strategies into your remote work landscape, please let us know! Most can be set up in minutes on one of our Free biweekly Ask-a-Trainer sessions!
