Beyond Your Department’s Four Walls
Extend Your Reach to the Referring Physician Community through Electronic Data Exchanges
Introduction
Most hospital departments utilize an interfacing application to route and process messages throughout the hospital system. These interfaces are typically built in a point-to-point manner by the hospital IT staff or may be built on an interface engine platform.
Hospitals of all sizes are discovering it can be more productive for an individual department to create and manage its own connections. These reasons include:
- A point–to-point interface that is too costly and ineffective to manage
- A legacy interface engine that does not support the quick building of new interfaces or that is difficult to monitor –especially at a departmental level
- A departmental integration problem that cannot be resolved due to a lack of IT resources or long queue of integration requests
- A desire for integration on a smaller scale within a department (e.g. departmental applications)
A need for quick and effective electronic acceptance of orders and delivery of results to the referring physician community
The solution to each of these scenarios is often a departmental interface engine. A departmental engine contains the general functionality of a hospital legacy engine but is purchased by a particular department. It works much like the legacy engine and enables the department to connect directly to external providers (e.g., physicians, clinics, imaging center, labs, etc.). In some cases, a departmental interface engine may leverage the existing hospital legacy engine by simply exchanging data with previously interfaced internal applications.Using a departmental interface engine allows departments to both maximize revenue from external clients and lessen the impact on the main hospital IT staff. The implementation cycle time for new interfaces is reduced by leveraging internal application interfaces and delivering physician interfaces at the departmental level. Typically, departmental engines increase efficiency, making the department more competitive while maximizing profitability and connectivity.
This paper outlines the two interfacing approaches – traditional and departmental – and describes key benefits of implementing a departmental interface engine. Hospital departments that might benefit most from a departmental interface engine include radiology, laboratory, pharmacy, medical devices, and cardiology. Business development or physician relations departments may also consider a departmental engine to build a comprehensive, strong network of physicians.
Traditional Interface Approach
In a traditional messaging environment, most departments within a hospital are connected to a legacy interface engine or rely on point-to-point interfaces. If a legacy engine is used, it typically requires programming by a central IT staff. This staff is responsible for designing, deploying and maintaining all connections for the hospital – both internal and external.
Often, these dedicated hospital IT staff are overextended and have limited resources to address the growing number of requests for healthcare application interfaces. This is especially true with the growth of connections to Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems, as resources are often difficult to secure when needed. Consequently, there can be a long wait time for new interfaces. When an external connection is required, it is typically prioritized behind projects already in the queue.
Creating new connections is usually done by the hospital IT staff and utilizes the legacy interface engine. Departments can then send data via an existing connection to the legacy engine, which is routed to the newly created second connection and on to the external provider.
Departmental Engine Approach
________________________________________________________________________What Is a Departmental Engine?
A departmental engine is an interface engine dedicated to your department – radiology, laboratory, pharmacy, cardiology, etc. It provides connectivity directly to your external providers and referring physician community with the minimum number of connections and maximum amount of control over the interface. It functions exactly like the hospital legacy interface engine by:
- Processing and sending clinical data messages (e.g. patient orders, patient reports)
- Logging message transactions for troubleshooting and reporting
- Transforming messages to meet physician and application message requirements and formats
- Monitoring interface performance and generating alerts for issues
A departmental interface engine easily deploys the interfaces being driven by physicians’ EMR applications. As a result, the departmental interface engine can enable closer relationships between the department and the physician.
To download a complete version of Beyond Your Department’s Four Walls, follow the PDF link below.
| Attachment | Size |
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| Interface-Engine-Approach-Hospital-Department.pdf | 110.91 KB |