Does Your Interface Engine Perform Like a Clunker or a Ferrari?
Often times, clients take the approach that their interfaces are functioning as designed and don’t want to risk “breaking” the interfaces by making adjustments. However, these interfaces may not be performing at maximum efficiency and/or may not be optimized to prevent errors. This issue is magnified for larger clients with a high volume of transactions.
Galen offers interface environment assessments which leverage Galen’s ConnectR Toolbelt – a ConnectR Add-On – to provide interface engine health, findings and recommendations. Many of the reports offered in our assessment can be automated to email at a regular interval to appropriate stakeholders, yielding a view into the health of the interface engine, which is a critical component to the EHR as it files and extracts data real-time.
Two common opportunities for improvement, which are also incidentally inter-related, include auto-addition of dictionary dependencies (For example – type, status, scheduling location for appointments, order item, result item, and where performed for results) and interface database lookup scripts. In terms of auto-addition of dictionary dependencies, these interfaces are initiated before the main interface. For instance, an interface to check for the existence of orderable/resultable item, and auto-add if it doesn’t already exist can be initiated previous to the interface that actually files the result to the database.
With the aforementioned dictionary dependency interfaces, often times, dictionary lookup scripts are employed to “check” to determine if the particular dictionary item already exists in the database. In a high-volume interface, this can result in a tremendous number of “lookups” to the clinical Works DB only to result in a blocked message for the dictionary auto-add interface call in ConnectR (because the dictionary item already exists). These database lookup scripts are very “costly” in performance terms and can take tens or hundreds of times longer than an in-memory look-up. This adversely affects the systems required to do that look-up – the database and network specifically. We have developed a Cached ConnectR Lookup solution which provides an alternative to the costly traditional database lookup scripts.
In conclusion, we highly encourage clients to take time to evaluate the performance of their interface engine. As those who own a vehicle can attest, preventative maintenance is much more desirable than waiting until something breaks.
Galen offers interface assessments, on-site and on-line interface mentorship services, tier 2 interface maintenance and monitoring services (staff augmentation) and general interface consultation. Please contact sales@galenhealthcare.com if you or your organization would like to learn more about how Galen Healthcare Solutions can help you.
