9 NOVEMBER - 2022By falling back to a systematic approach of identifying the business problem and exploring solutions, we were able to innovate and realize a substantial improvement in efficiencytime-consuming process. We began to engage our dispatch EMR vendor to look for an automated solution to reduce the man-hours needed for this process.Our dispatch EMR exchanges data with the NEMSIS specification. Our dispatch EMR vendor was able to supply a sample of a NEMSIS export with an embedded chart PDF. We sought out one of our systems engineers who is highly regarded and known for thinking outside the box. In reviewing the NEMSIS sample, he was confident that the NEMSIS export could be converted to HL7 for import into the hospital's EMR and that the entire process could be automated.To build the integration, we had to ensure that the components that we would use for routing the chart into the hospital EMR were available for every chart. This was accomplished by building validation rules into the dispatch EMR that would require documentation of the emergency physician, medical record number and account number for every patient designated as an EMS consult. The dispatch EMR was then set to automatically export a NEMSIS file with embedded PDF for every EMS consult to a folder on our share drive.Our systems engineer wrote a program that would take the NEMSIS files exported to the folder, extract the embedded patient demographics, provider information & PDF, and then route them into the hospital EMR. The PDF is routed to the correct patient and encounter using the MRN and account number. It is then routed to the emergency physician's message center inbox for electronic signature, using the physician's name in the NEMSIS export. Initially, we encountered spelling errors on the physician's name which would result in mapping errors. We solved this by converting this field in the dispatch EMR to a dropdown field.As stated earlier, our industry is becoming more and more reliant on IT infrastructure. However, as is often the case with rapid change, integrations between IT infrastructures have not kept pace with our fast growth. By falling back to a systematic approach of identifying the business problem and exploring solutions, we were able to innovate and realize a substantial improvement in efficiency. Of course, this could not have been done without our expert partners. The approach that we found helpful was to be able to clearly articulate the problem, our current capability, and then our desired outcome. · We are currently performing this documentation and signature process manually, our software is capable of a NEMSIS file export with PDF, and we would like to utilize that pathway to automate the process through the hospital EMR.Growth is achieved by constantly pushing on our current barriers and daring to ask for more. Partnering with key stakeholders and collaborating on process improvements is a force multiplier that can pay dividends. We encourage all of our partners in the industry to continue to push beyond their barriers, and we wish each team facing challenges similar to ours great success!
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