Nashville, TN. – November, 2007
Dalcon Technologies: An Integration Success Story
Introduction
In November of 2004,
Ann Koresdoski, Vice President and General Manager at Dalcon
Technologies, was not sure that their parent company was going to
keep her operation alive. Dalcon, a Nashville based application
service provider in the healthcare industry, was operating a legacy
system that did not contain an internal interface to other medical
systems. The existing external interface was written in-house and
was supposed to allow patient data to be sent to external medical
systems and receive medical reports from those systems for their
customers in 200 diagnostic imaging centers in the US. The problem
was that while the legacy system could handle the volume, the
external interface was unable to cope with the load in an accurate
and timely manner. Each time that the parent company asked if they
could take on another interface job, the response than Ann was
forced to give was “no, I’m sorry we can’t handle that type of
transaction as there is no way to add that type of data message into
our already overloaded systems.”
To say that the
interface system was overloaded was being kind. There were six
servers attempting to process data from 35 different internal
sources related to the Dalcon legacy application. The team was
attempting to send data to vastly different databases that did not
speak a common standard language, thus none could easily talk with
any other. Their only option for interface maintenance was to
dedicate a staff member to literally sit in front of the servers,
watching and waiting for the next of many interface errors, and then
manually reset the interfaces after the causes of the failures were
repaired. Worse still, even though a failure could be identified
almost right away, there was no easy way for Dalcon staff to go back
to find out what transactions had been processed and which ones had
been lost. Combined with the day to day stress of barely being able
to handle what was already on her plate, and not being able to take
on any new relationships with outside medical vendors due to the
limitations of the existing interface engine, Koresdoski was getting
the reputation of being a “no-can-do” manager. This was truly not
the case, but there were rumblings that the parent company,
increasingly frustrated with the inability to move medical data from
the Dalcon legacy system to other potential partners (such as PACs,
transcription, document management, etc.) was considering shutting
Dalcon down.
This is as much a
story of a turnaround as it is the value of relationships and
referrals. Koresdoski, in describing her situation to a former
colleague, heard about Brentwood, TN based eTransX, and their
database integration package, eTX HMIE (Healthcare Messaging and
Integration Engine). Ann had heard of these kinds of technologies in
the past and had essentially dismissed them as being
underfunctioning, overpriced, requiring tens of thousands of dollars
of consulting fees and taking somewhere close to forever to
implement. She had neither the time, the patience, nor the budget to
go on what she thought could be another wild goose chase. She had
real problems that needed addressing quickly, and at a fair price.
Her former colleague suggested that she at the very least meet with
eTransX to see what they had to say, as he had been impressed and
perhaps, so would she. In the face of a possible shutdown of her
operation and thinking that she may have nothing to lose, she agreed
to a meeting.
That first meeting
turned into a four hour marathon, exploring every critical issue
that Dalcon was facing. On the surface, it seemed that everything
that she was looking to accomplish could be done with eTX HMIE, and
perhaps more. That took care of the functionality question, but the
key questions remained, could it be delivered within her budget and
without the “hundreds of hours of consulting time” that other
similar systems seemed to require? Again a pleasant surprise.
With little more than
four weeks of dedicated work effort, the eTransX team had the eTX
HMIE not only operational, but processing thousands of transactions
per hour. Now eight months later, Koresdoski has not only received a
vote of confidence from the head office, but the interface project
and its success helped secure the jobs of her entire Nashville
staff. Once eTX HMIE was implemented and working live in a
production environment, it quickly became evident that, unlike the
earlier interface, eTX HMIE ran with almost no human intervention
and had an efficient error recovery mechanism that also sent out
email notification if all else failed.
The story doesn’t end
there. The flexibility of the eTX HMIE allows Dalcon to accommodate
more vendors that her corporate office and medical centers wish to
work with, without concern about overextending her capacity to
handle the extra business. That extra business still involves
bringing in data from the Dalcon legacy system and sending it to a
diversity of systems and databases - some structured and some
unstructured. Any integration requires cooperation between both
sources of data (or both companies involved,) but because the eTX
HMIE presents such a logical interface and methodology, it is as
Koresdoski says:
“Dalcon is now able
to work one on one with new vendors to develop an interface that is
solid and reliable. eTX HMIE is transparent to different database
technologies, file systems or web systems, which allows us to be in
complete control of our side of every integration.”
About Dalcon
Dalcon Technologies
is a subsidiary of Medical Resources, Inc. that operates and manages
fixed-site outpatient medical diagnostic imaging centers in the
United States, with 55 imaging centers in nine states. Dalcon
develops and markets software products and systems for the
administration and operation of the outpatient diagnostic imaging
industry.
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