New Mexico – November, 2007
A Case Study on William Beaumont Army Medical Center
Introduction
William Beaumont Army
Medical Center (WBAMC) in New Mexico was embarking on an executive
dashboard system (EDS) for the administrators of Army Medical Center
to assess the quality of care provided to uniformed service
personnel, retirees and dependents at the Center. The task involved
getting patient care information from the army’s The Composite
Health Care System (CHCS) along with other information from various
systems at the Army Medical Center in real time to compile a
comprehensive dashboard system using business intelligence and
integration technologies. The Composite Health Care System (CHCS) is
one of the largest medical systems in the world and the primary
automated medical information system for the Department of Defense (DoD).
CHCS provides essential, automated information support to Military
Health System (MHS) providers, enabling improved quality of care for
8.9 million MHS beneficiaries at more than 700 DoD hospitals and
clinics worldwide. For patients, CHCS facilitates improvements in
the delivery of health care that reduce wait time, increase access
to medical and professional resources, and expedite diagnostic
testing. For providers, CHCS promotes increased communication and
supports near real-time access to patient information.
One of the
difficulties WBAMC faced was to get the patient care information
from the CHCS in real-time. Since CHCS would only communicate with
external systems using Health Level 7 (HL7) protocol, they needed an
HL7 Integration engine that would accept HL7 feeds from CHCS and
process other data along with that. After doing extensive research
on the available HL7 Integration engines, WBAMC finally decided on
eTransX’ eTX HMIE, Healthcare Messaging and Integration Engine to
solve their problem. They came to their conclusion after they had
extensive discussions with eTransX on eTX HMIE’s technology, its
architecture, its user friendliness, its scalability and its
flexibility to meet their needs.
eTransX installed eTX
HMIE remotely and configured the systems to accept real-time HL7
feed from CHCS. eTX HMIE processed the HL7 feeds and updated their
data warehouse with the patient information, their visits and the
care provided to them in a week’s time.
In addition to the
Healthcare messaging capabilities (all versions of HL7 integration),
eTX HMIE has extensive integration capabilities such as database,
flat file, web server, FTP, email, and Web services integration.
WBAMC is well poised to exploit its full capabilities for future
integration projects to enable an integrated healthcare intelligence
to better serve uniformed service personnel, retirees and dependents
at the Center.
|
