Automating Registrations into Outpatients

4 min read

Boston WorkStation® is a workflow automation platform that allows Savience to revolutionise how they work with healthcare organisations.

Boston WorkStation maximises the efficiency of any process, and allows hospitals to quickly implement strategic initiatives hand in hand with the Savience suite of applications. A true platform for automation, Boston WorkStation is used to increase patient safety, enhance clerical workflow and support efficient clinical decisions thus reducing costs, by saving time and streamlining workflow.

How does Boston WorkStation compliment Savience Applications?

In many hospitals across UK, Ireland and Canada, patients use self-check in kiosks each day to mark their attendance at an Outpatient or ER department and the subsequent update to the appropriate hospital appointment system (e.g. HIS/PAS/Radiology/Radiotherapy) is managed by Boston Workstation. Savience software produces an HL7 arrival message that is passed to Boston Workstation which then automates a client connection to the appointment system, accesses the patient record and marks the appointment as attended. At this point the opportunity is also taken to update the patient’s contact telephone number, Health card number, ethnicity, marital status and number of other demographics as appropriate. No changes have been required to the hospital system or local infrastructure, and an update is achieved within 10 seconds of the patient using the kiosk. Boston Workstation stays connected to the appointments system to be ready to quickly process new arrivals and updates.

Boston at William Osler Health Care

William Osler Health System is one of Canada’s largest community hospital corporations and includes Etobicoke General, Brampton Civic and Peel Memorial; which together provide a comprehensive range of acute-care, ambulatory and ancillary health services. Osler operates 807 inpatient beds and employs a team of more than 4,100 dedicated health care professionals – while striving to deliver on its mission of innovative health care delivered with compassion.

William Osler Health System was interested in implementing a Patient Pre-Registration, Appointment Management and Queuing System to provide patients with a seamless interaction between their home and their hospital care. Patients use the kiosks as one method to register their arrival and depending the category of their appointment (Clinical Outpatient, Re-Occurring Outpatient or Surgical Day Care), a script was developed by Savience to provide an automated registration back to the Meditech HIS.

Upon registration at the kiosk, a file is created and picked up by the Boston workstation software that contains the patents registration details. The connection to Meditech is then opened. The scripting follows the process of populating the relevant screens in Meditech that typically the reception clerk would complete. The scripts emulate the process of populating and validating the Health Card number first which is then followed by the screening questions unique to William Osler. Demographic information and Family Doctor information is also scripted into Meditech. Once the relevant fields have been populated by the scripting, the system is prompted to print a wrist band or cover sheet to assist the clerical team in moving the patient onto their next step at the hospital.

The whole process takes seconds to run. With the scripting imitating the user process in Meditech, registrations clerks can concentrate on other tasks whilst the patients are keen to register and update their information through the privacy of the kiosk.

How is it installed?

Boston Workstation is a single Windows application installed on a simple workstation running Windows 7 Professional. This can be either a virtual machine or a physical workstation.

Boston is configured to connect to the host appointment system and can connect to terminal based systems, browser front ended systems, and windows clients. Savience write an initial script to log in to the host system and handle all the possible exceptions that may occur – such as expired passwords for instance. This basic script is also designed to navigate the user menus. We then produce scripts to handle particular updates and these scripts are typically triggered by the HL7 message type. New scripts can be produced and added quickly, maximising the benefits of automation.

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