Posted on behalf of Erin McDonagh, Director, B2B
At the International MUSE conference this year, I attended the MEDITECH Automation in a Nutshell presentation by Joe Austin and Tim Fail from Wayne Memorial Hospital, North Carolina. They spoke about Summit’s InSync (dictionary management) and Scripting Toolkit.
Their need for automation was based on scheduling, reports, scripting (for vendors that didn’t play well with MEDITECH) and migrations.
Everyone struggles with dictionary synchronization, there is nothing easy or pretty about it…”if you do it in test then you do it in live”. They highlighted that most users are doing it in live first, then test.
In the MEDITECH environment, there is so much going on right now with the priority packs that are coming out three or four times a year and you want to make sure that what you are testing in the test environment will perform the same way in the live environment. Wayne Memorial Hospital struggled with keeping their dictionaries in sync and made a conscious decision not to keep up with all dictionaries, their focus is on about 70% of their dictionaries.
Summit InSync is a user-friendly tool that serves as a point-and-click guide through the dictionary extraction and selection process. It is extremely granule, allowing you to get down to the minute level of detail. Summit presents a side by side comparison of test and live with a color-coded analysis screen. When the dictionaries match, it shows a green check mark and when they do not match the system throws up a red flag. There is a lot of flexibility within the system, you can limit the results to show you only the results that are mismatched. For example, if you have 1500 records and you only have 8 that are mismatched you can go right to those 8.
The presenters recommend doing your due diligence when choosing a synchronization tool. One of the reasons they chose Summit’s InSync product was because it does a direct extraction out. There are a lot of choices on the market and one thing to be aware of with some vendors’ solution includes direct extraction in. The research is important because what they found was that direct extractions back into the MEDITECH system are not supported by MEDITECH. And, if there is a problem MEDITECH is not going to help you with that.
One benefit for Wayne Memorial Hospital was using InSync to help solve the time constraints with NPR. The NPR writers at their facility were extremely busy and trying to get time with them or on their calendar was difficult. To be able to use Summit’s InSync product to go in and collect data at the dictionary level that they could utilize, manipulate and use for our scripting was a very nice thing. Prior to that process, they would pull the data from NPR, download to excel and try to figure out what was different. Then use that data for the scripting engine and push it back into MEDITECH. There was a lot of overhead with the previous process.
Additional benefits they saw from using InSync was saving an average of 20 – 24 hours of work per month and they felt that this number would increase as they added more tasks to the scheduler. The ability to add more and manage multiple projects; increased efficiencies among IT and the respective departments. And, a decrease in data transcription errors.
