Customer Spotlight: Dictionary Updates Support Canadian Health Standards

The Credit Valley Hospital in Mississauga, Ontario (Canada), has been actively using Boston Software Systems’ automation technology, Boston WorkStation™, to streamline a variety of workflows for the past seven years. As a result, the hospital has greatly improved its registration processes, saving time, increasing accuracy and revenue recovery, and ultimately, improving patient care.

Due to changes from the Standards Information Systems in Canadian Health Service Organizations (MIS Standards), the revision of laboratory workload units is required across more than 3,000 dictionary entries in the Laboratory, Microbiology, Blood Bank and Pathology modules’ dictionaries. The Credit Valley Hospital chose to tackle this massive update using Boston Software System’s UNISON™. UNISON is a standalone application for hospitals using MEDITECH information systems, which simplifies the development of dictionary synchronization, and can schedule the sync to occur regularly without human intervention.

Arnelle Martins, application analyst at The Credit Valley Hospital, was asked to update the lab data dictionaries for this initiative. Normally, staff would spend weeks manually synchronizing thousands of data points in multiple dictionaries. Although she didn’t have a lot of time to spend on training for UNISON, Martins found the application to be surprisingly intuitive.

UNISON’s set-up wizard allowed her to select specific data required from the test dictionary, and then walked her through the process of updating her records into the live dictionary of each module, taking into account its specific requirements.

Martins found the Boston Software Systems support team was also ready to help. “The people at Boston Software Systems are exceptional.” said Martins. “I had never had any training, yet I was able to quickly understand UNISON thanks to the support team.”

As a result of using UNISON, Martins finds she not only quickly performs massive one-time dictionary updates, but she also now finds regular dictionary maintenance is much faster and easier. “It took me two months to gather all the requirements, build the syncronizations, then go live and verify the results. But it would have taken a total of more than 300 hours of staff time just to perform the updates manually,” added Martins. “In addition to completing the job quickly and easily, I learned a new technology in the process – one which I will be able to continuously use and from which the hospital will benefit tremendously.”

To learn more about The Credit Valley Hospital, visit them online at www.cvh.on.ca.

For more information about UNISON for Meditech dictionaries or other automation tools from Boston Software Systems, visit www.bostonworkstation.com or call 866.653.5105.