Lincoln Surgical Implements Summit Scripting Toolkit To Streamline EHR And RIS/PACS Integration

Leading Nebraska facility to achieve $100,000 annual FTE and interface savings

Summit Healthcare, hospitals’ top choice for healthcare integration solutions, recently announced that Lincoln Surgical Hospital, a multi-specialty surgical hospital in Nebraska, has enhanced integration between its Electronic Health Record (EHR) and Radiology Information System Picture Archiving and Communications Systems (RIS/PACS) using Summit Scripting Toolkit (SST). The surgical hospital expects to save more than $100,000 annually by avoiding fees for each integration point, with fewer full time employees (FTEs) to manage the PACS-EHR data integration process.

Lincoln Surgical Hospital had previously employed a multi-step, manual process to get data from its PACS into its MEDITECH EHR. Healthcare Information Management (HIM) staff would print files, generate labels, affix them to documents and then scan them into the EHR, creating multiple opportunities for human or mechanical errors to occur. Using SST, the process now requires less than 20 seconds of human interaction per file, and the entire process of updating the patient record can be completed in less than one minute.

“With the Summit Scripting Toolkit, it took me less than eight hours to create the script, test it and put it into full production,” said Jonathan Lenners, IT Analyst, Lincoln Surgical Hospital.

Lincoln Surgical Hospital’s medical records department projected the need to add one and a half FTEs to support its old process for FY 2015, but the increased efficiency of the new workflow allowed the organization to retain current staffing levels. This has further enhanced the cost savings associated with avoided interface fees, and contributed to a rapid return on investment that exceeded expectations.

“We achieved full return on our investment in just three months between time savings, reduced material costs and not hiring one and a half FTEs,” Lenners said. “We estimate an annual savings of at least $100,000 using Summit Healthcare’s solution, plus we have avoided the hassle of waiting for our vendors to develop and deliver one-off interfaces.”

About Lincoln Surgical Hospital
Lincoln Surgical Hospital is an innovative healthcare leader in providing exceptional surgical services for our patients. Its dedicated physicians and staff strive to achieve optimal surgical outcomes in a patient focused atmosphere. For more information, visit www.lincolnsurgery.com.

About Summit Healthcare
Summit Healthcare provides healthcare organizations with comprehensive solutions for data automation, integration, and continuity challenges by applying extensive experience and proven technology. Since 1999 we have serviced our customers to ensure each organization achieves the full value of their investment, with the appropriate blend of leadership and support. Together, our solutions and services represent cost-effective, easy to manage platforms, which reliably integrate applications, automate workflows, and simplifies business processes across the healthcare enterprise. For more information, visit www.summit-healthcare.com.

About The Summit Scripting Toolkit
From the simplest script to the most complex interface, the Summit Scripting Toolkit (SST) provides a cost-effective solution that enables you to extract or input data from any system, create real-time or batch interfaces and automate routine data entry tasks. SST provides a full-featured, proven scripting environment complete with all the advanced scripting tools necessary to build, test and deploy scripts from a single desktop application.