05/26/2004

MITEM Corporation, a provider of integration software and clinical applications for health care, says Alice Hyde Medical Center in Malone, N.Y. has gone live with a new Blue Iris solution that “provides start-to-finish automation of lab orders between a physician's office and a hospital's legacy information systems.”

MITEM added these details:

This new Blue Iris solution, named Office Connect, is based on MITEM's powerful legacy integration platform that provides out-of-the-box integration with MEDITECH MAGIC and other legacy systems.

The Blue Iris Office Connect solution provides a fully automated solution for entering lab orders and delivering results. Office Connect not only eliminates many error-prone manual processes that are inherent in the lab order process (e.g. faxes, hand-written notes and verbally communicated orders), but also provides additional safeguards that check key patient demographics to validate lab orders.

The success of this project was critical to Alice Hyde Medical Center's lab testing business. Alice Hyde's largest lab customer required that their Misys Tiger system be interfaced with the hospital's MEDITECH MAGIC system to automate lab order entry and results reporting.

Mike Kelly, CIO at Alice Hyde Medical Center, described the changes in the competitive environment of the hospital's lab testing business this way: "Due to HIPAA pressures many physician practices purchased electronic medical record (EMR) products. After deploying these systems they discovered that they had the ability to enter lab orders in their new EMR and receive test results electronically. Subsequently, many of these same physicians were approached by large national reference labs and were offered a lab interface to their EMR at no cost if they agreed to use these companies for testing. We realized that to retain our best lab customers we would have to provide them with connectivity from their systems to our MEDITECH MAGIC system."

The Blue Iris Office Connect solution at Alice Hyde now automates the ordering of 200 of the most common lab tests and has the ability to process over 1,100 other less commonly placed lab orders. In addition, while processing a lab order, Blue Iris can detect if that patient has been admitted to the MEDITECH system. If they have not been registered, Blue Iris will automatically admit them through MEDITECH for registration and billing purposes-a process that must take place before a lab test can be ordered.

Kelly commented, "It was extremely important to us to deploy a solution that had a two-way interface. MITEM was the only vendor we knew of that could pull information from MAGIC and write back to the system. This ability has enabled us to accrue much operational efficiency in our facility as well as provide the interface that enables our key physician office customer to place lab orders electronically. We could have gone with a partial solution - one that would have given our lab customer what they needed, but would have not helped us on our end. By using Blue Iris we have not only retained a key lab customer, but we have also automated many processes surrounding lab orders and improved patient care at the same time."

Kathy Avery, lab manger at Alice Hyde added, "In addition to increasing customer satisfaction, Blue Iris Office Connect allows our outreach clerk to process specimens in half the time vs. manual registration."

Blue Iris Office Connect can interface with Misys Tiger, WebMD Clinician and other practice management and EMR systems.