A more reliable, user friendly interface engine

The company

Pathology, Inc. is California's premier laboratory for anatomic, molecular, and digital pathology services, with a focus on women's health. The laboratory has provided high quality services in Southern California since 1979. Its commitment to innovation and value-added services delivers comprehensive diagnostic and prognostic information for patient treatment planning. The passion and vision of Pathology, Inc. for better healthcare are producing significant improvement in physicians' practices and in the lives of their patients.

The challenge

With the increased adoption of electronic medical records by referring physicians, Pathology, Inc. faced a new and complex challenge: establishing a high-function HL7 interface from its laboratory information system (LIS) to office-based physicians' EMRs. Pathology, Inc. evaluated various systems, but those systems lacked the reliability and user experience the lab required in an interface engine. Pathology, Inc. set out to find an enterprise class HL7 messaging engine aligned with its requirements.

The solution

After researching numerous HL7 messaging engines on the market, Pathology, Inc. determined that eTransX offered the best-of-breed technology and the straightforward, flexible pricing the lab wanted.

Pathology, Inc. adopted the eTransX Healthcare Enterprise Messaging and Integration (HEMI) engine. With eTX HEMI no programming is required, giving Pathology, Inc. the intuitive user experience it was looking for. The engine delivers a configuration-driven, total integration platform for comprehensive healthcare integration without writing a single line of code. Alongside eTX HEMI, Pathology, Inc. deployed eTX Stream at each physician's office as a more reliable alternative to a virtual private network.

"We greatly prefer to use eTX Stream because of its ease of implementation and reliability compared to a standard VPN. With a VPN, we know communication has been established, but it requires more steps and there's no confirmation that a file has been successfully transmitted. With the VPN, the files disappear, but you don't see a log of the file transfer," said Carla Mezquita, Information Systems, Pathology, Inc. She went on to say, "The reliability of HEMI and the Stream is great. Whenever there is an issue, such as an IP address change on the client side, eTX Stream sends us a notification alerting us to that issue."

The results

Since implementing the eTransX integration tools in 2008, Pathology, Inc. has been very pleased with the value and reliability delivered by eTX HEMI and eTX Stream. Each month the Pathology, Inc. IT staff create client interfaces without having to write a single line of code. Interface development takes from a few days to a few weeks depending on the response time of the EMR vendor. "Creating the interface on the Pathology, Inc. end takes only a day or two," said Mezquita.